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Kirk Lashley
Builder | Travel Tech | Entrepreneur | Investor Working on our next big thing
Kirk Lashley is a technology leader with over 20 years of professional software development experience. He is a software polyglot, experienced in many programming languages, and enjoys working with teams of engineers. Kirk has successfully managed over 100 web application projects since the late 90s and founded a web dev shop in the Caribbean in the 2000s and an on-demand startup in Chicago in the mid-2010s. Now, he serves as the CTO at a travel tech company in Chicago, Rocket Travel, a Booking Holdings, Inc company. Kirk has a background in technology leadership, business operations, and strategy. He believes that technology should not be siloed from the business needs and lives at the crossroads of technology, design, entrepreneurship, and faith. Kirk is a Techstars Chicago 2014 alum and has been a technical adviser to startups in Chicago and the Caribbean since 2012. He is a startup and entrepreneurship protagonist for the Caribbean and currently organizes Startup Weekends Trinidad & Tobago and Chicago.
Highlights
They say early stage startups are about team, team, team. In this last week I’ve found this to be so true to see my full team rallying around me as an unknown sickness has me down for the count. From offering to bring me smoothies on the weekend to letting me take my mind off the backlog so I can focus on long term health vs short term results.
I’m honored that the humans I work with really care about each other.
This is what makes it worth it.
P.S. Yes LinkedIn, I know when I left my last role I was supposed to be taking a break. But you know, builders would build…
I've been reading resumes, CVs and profiles from engineers in Latin America and the Caribbean trying to get remote roles at US companies. I think its a cultural thing, but that has to change as the technical talent is clearly there but companies are looking for results; outputs > inputs.
When your resume reads like a job description instead of the value you produced you're missing a valuable opportunity to elevate yourself and draw a direct line from what you have done to the value you provide.
Companies aren't hiring engineers to chose component libraries or write multi-threaded applications, they're hiring them to solve customer problems expressed as user stories and resulting in value for the company.
