Palomino Labs began as a vehicle to share our broad product development expertise with companies struggling with the transition to new platforms and technologies. We began building products together in 2007 (an eon ago in the world of software development) and founded Palomino Labs in 2011. Through the intervening years, we have continually, and iteratively, improved our product development process and adapted it to thrive in many disparate environments.
Note: Although Palomino Labs the company no longer exists, our culture survives on in our other ventures, so we're keeping this page around for posterity.
Fundamental to our approach is the belief that advancements in programming languages, development environments, hosting platforms, delivery channels, and inbound marketing practices continues to dramatically reduce the cost and time required to develop, host, scale, and market software products. As a result, validating a product in the market has never been easier.
We also believe fostering a close-knit, highly collaborative, and technically diverse team of experienced developers and product strategists maximizes product quality and development efficiency.
As CEO, Ryan advises a broad range of clients from fledgling entrepreneurs to Fortune 100 executives. Prior to co-founding Palomino Labs, Ryan was CTO of Tello (acquired by UrbanAirship). As CTO, Ryan led the development of consumer mobile, web, and enterprise SaaS offerings for collecting and reporting real-time customer service ratings. Prior to Tello, Ryan was director of engineering at Genius.com where he led development, QA, build & release, and product management. During his time at Genius, Ryan led the conversion from siloed waterfall development to integrated and iterative agile development. Over time, this transition shrunk release cycles from 4 months to 1 week and delivered 36 consecutive on-time, high-quality releases of new features.
Andrew’s mobile development experience dates back to building a mobile web front-end for Buzzillions.com’s consumer reviews system back before developing for mobile was either cool or easy. Since then, Andrew joined Genius.com developing real-time SaaS applications for sales and marketers in Java and PHP. Most recently, Andrew was a Senior Software Developer for Tello building a real-time mobile customer service rating application in Rails and Objective-C. While a student at Harvey Mudd College, Andrew co-founded and managed Mudd Software Designs, an organization that builds software systems as a service to the college community while teaching underclassman the principles of good software design and product management.
Skilled in Rails, PHP, Java, JavaScript, and iOS development, Tyler began building dynamic websites when he was 14. Tyler’s expertise includes web application security and design and developing recommendation and rating systems. While at Genius.com, Tyler helped develop their Java integration with Salesforce.com and Genius’ own external API. Following Genius.com, Tyler was a Senior Software Developer at Tello where he led a major upgrade of a Rails 2 application to Rails 3, helped develop both the native iPhone and Sencha Touch mobile applications, and the OAuth based Rails API consumed by the mobile applications. While a student at Harvey Mudd College, Tyler co-founded Mudd Software Designs, an organization that builds software systems as a service to the college community while teaching underclassman the principles of good software design and product management.
Marshall specializes in highly tuned and immensely scalable web and mobile applications. Experienced in front-end web and iOS development, he constantly pushes the boundaries of the latest browsers and mobile platforms. He splits his time with back-end development, where he is considered a domain expert in Java concurrency, distributed systems, systems design, and network security. Prior to co-founding Palomino Labs, Marshall was director of software development at Ness Computing where he led their initial launch. Before Ness, Marshall was a senior software developer at Genius.com, where he built the best-in-class integration with Salesforce.com.
Manuel is a sponge for software knowledge. Manuel’s software development expertise ranges from Rails web development to obscure 3rd party APIs and long-forgotten web properties. Manuel was the “API guy” at Genius.com, recognized for his deep knowledge of how to build and scale APIs. At Turn, Manuel focused on improving the exciting world of display advertising. Most recently at Tello, Manuel led the integration with Twilio and KISSMetrics. At Palomino Labs, Manuel also serves as Director of IE Compatibility.
Drew’s expertise lies in high-traffic web services, big data, and building hyper-efficient software teams. At Clearspring, Drew created and supported APIs that handled more than 6 million daily requests, monitored detailed metrics from processing clusters with hundreds of nodes, and delivered thousands of events per second to users in real-time. Drew is skilled in systems administration and takes automation seriously, applying the Unix adage "if you do it twice, you're doing it wrong" ruthlessly. As a certified Scrum Master, Drew worked alongside Ryan to build a kaizen-based development organization at Genius.com capable of delivering high-quality products as-promised and on-time. Drew spends his time away from computers lifting heavy things and racing cars that are well past their prime.
Hayden joined Palomino Labs from Hulu where he developed large-scale, multi-platform client applications running on a range of living room devices including Wii, PS3, and WiiU. In addition to his development responsiblities, Hayden managed developer relationships with Roku. Prior to Hulu, Hayden earned an MS in Computer Science from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD).
Ace's time at Palomino Labs has seen him immersed in iOS and aptly transitioning between server-side technologies (including Java, Ruby on Rails, and StackMob). Before joining Palomino Labs, Ace was a developer on the Boku Accounts team that built an ecosystem for consumers to use their mobile phone to make purchases at brick and mortar merchants, leading the POS integration. Prior to Boku, Ace was a developer at CRC where he led the project to modernize their 15+ year old technology stack and migrate from VB6 to C# and .NET.
Ron's role at Palomino Labs finds him working with developers to manage and guide the products they build. He has experience working on a broad swath of web and mobile projects, often wearing many different hats. Ron spends the rest of his time designing and assembling pretty and usable interfaces for clients, and making regular code commits.
Ever wondered where to find the best carnitas in the Bay Area, or where to go in Redwood City if you are have a hankering for an awesome super burrito? We have, and we decided to figure it out.
For almost three years, we have diligently visited a different taqueria every Tuesday, led by Ryan's desire to find the best bean and cheese burrito (with cilantro and onion). We are not sidetracked by the amazing taquerias we have found, nor are we discouraged by the mediocre ones we encounter. We will continue exploring new places as long as there are taquerias on the Peninsula that we haven't tried.
What could be better than smoking a dry-rubbed pork shoulder? Smoking a pork shoulder, some bacon-wrapped black ale-marinated tri-tip, and a chicken or two, that's what. At Palomino Labs, we take crafting delicious meat seriously (though there are also plenty of non-meats to go around in case of vegetarians). With two Weber Smokey Mountain smokers, a Kettle Pizza with Baking Steel, plenty of grill space, and a plentiful beverage supply, we know how to spend a weekend afternoon in style.
Coffee has a pretty established presence in all offices, and Palomino Labs is no exception. A few of us are actually quite obsessive about it. We have a number of different brewing methods and devices at our disposal (Chemex, Clever, Aeropress, or our glorious espresso machine) and with the help of a good burr grinder and digital scale, we produce some of the best cup of coffee you've had in a while. And if you're a tea drinker, Ryan's tea collection will leave you just as dazzled.
As fanatic as we are about coffee, we may be even crazier about beers. Weekly shipments from our favorite breweries keep our fridge well-stocked (and the shelves bowing under the weight), because sometimes you just feel like taste-testing a flight of Cascade Brewing's sour beers, or maybe having a nice glass of imperial stout aged in bourbon barrels from The Bruery. Our resident expert brewer Tyler also takes requests, so we often experiment with tastes. His huckleberry chocolate porter is an office favorite.
We actually built an inventory and rating tracking system to manage all our beers—check out the widgets below that show what we've currently got in stock.
Seems like a lot of this stuff is about food or drink, huh? Well, we also bowl! Our championship bowling team, Bowlomino Labs, competes weekly at Bel Mateo Bowl. The league does give us a pitcher of beer with every game though, so maybe that's really why we do it.
Our office was in Redwood City and you would have loved it.