Building vs Buying: Expert Insights for Smart Choices
Summary
The choice between building an in-house solution and buying from a third-party never goes away. Engineering bandwidth is precious and there’s no shortage of SaaS options promising easy deployment and big returns. In this panel, experienced leaders get together to talk about how they tackle this challenge. We’ll go beyond the obvious and share how our panelists approach these decisions and reflect on the outcomes.
Speakers
Dr. Rong Yan is currently the VP of Engineering in Hubspot Inc., a world leading CRM cloud-based software company. He is responsible for their Data products including automation, data operations, reporting and data framework. He was the CTO for Verishop Inc, an e-commerce platform that combines quality curation and discovery. He was the Senior Engineering Director of Product Engineering in Snap Inc. His team is responsible for developing and maintaining the core product features in Snapchat, which is one of the most popular mobile applications in the world. Before joining Snap, he was the Director of Data Science and Infrastructure in Square Inc. from 2013 to 2014, an engineering manager for the Ads Relevance & Quality team in Facebook from 2009 to 2013, responsible for optimizing delivery performance for all Facebook ad products, and a Research Staff Member in the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center from 2006 to 2009. Dr. Yan received his M.Sc. (2004) and Ph.D. (2006) degree from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. He has received 2 Best Paper runner-Up awards, published more than 60 papers, and co-chaired more than 10 conferences / workshops in related domains.
Allan Leinwand is Chief Technology Officer at Webflow, leading the engineering team that is building solutions to bring development superpowers to everyone. Prior to Slack, Allan was CTO at Shopify and Senior Vice President of Engineering at Slack. Throughout his career, Allan held senior leadership positions at multiple companies and was a venture capital investor for seven years. He founded Vyatta (acquired by Brocade), the open-source networking company, and co-authored “Cisco Router Configuration” and “Network Management: A Practical Perspective” and has been granted a patent in the field of data routing. Leinwand previously served as an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he taught on the subjects of computer networks, network management and network design. He holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Jan Chong is Vice President of Engineering at Tally, a financial automation company helping people navigate the complex world of consumer finance to save money, pay down their debt and reach their goals sooner. She leads and oversees the company’s client engineering, infrastructure security and technical operations teams. Before joining Tally, Jan was a long-time executive at Twitter where she played a critical role in launching and scaling its core mobile and web products, overseeing a team of more than 300 people in Twitter’s consumer engineering organization. Prior to that, Jan ran client and server development at OnLive, a cloud gaming platform. She received multiple degrees from Stanford University, including her Ph.D in management science and engineering, and M.S. and B.S in computer science.
Alon Levi is VP of Engineering at WorkOS, a modern platform that empowers any developer to quickly build and ship enterprise features.
He previously led engineering teams at Google, Dropbox, Quip, Salesforce, and Slack, where he focused on developer platforms, enterprise features, productivity, and more.
Alon is a Bay Area native, loves to travel, and spends his free time entertaining his three young kids.
