Octavian 'Vivi' Costache

I went to school in Romania. All throughout high school I kept competing in CS Olympiads and I was pretty good at it.

As a freelancer through college I've built a lot of corporate websites. I also built the 30th most popular site in the country - a multiplayer gaming site built in Flash, and a community for teachers. They helped me finance my paragliding hobby.

In 2005 I joined Google here in NYC and was there for 5 years. Great company to learn how to build software at a massive scale.

I built GMail's Multiple Inboxes, and the Google Finance charts. I took over and launched Starring (bookmarking places), then tech-lead the infrastructure changes for Social Search on Google Maps. Once I felt that I wasn't learning as much as I wanted to, I left.

For a while I worked on machine generated journalism. Good idea, but ahead of its time and definitely not a good business.

In 2013 I co-founded Spring. The company went from zero to 120 people, and raised ~$100mm in three rounds of funding while I was there. I hired, built, managed and scaled up the Engineering, Integrations & Product Management teams (~50 people org).

What we've delivered on the technical side - a full catalog of products with up-to-date inventory from 1500 integrated brands - was the only tech of its kind in the US (while others like Stripe, Twitter or Pinterest attempted but did not succeed).

I paraglide. I like nature travel. I've built a map of romanian politicians because I think Romania can and should be a better place. I was featured in a New York Times article about meetings.

Now I am looking to start a new company. Stay tuned!

Where to find me on the internets:

linkedin.com/in/okvivi/

Thanks for dropping by,
Octavian.