Meet Karim Varela, CTO @ Coffee Meets Bagel on agile software and meeting 10x spikes in traffic

Summary: We met with Karim Varela, CTO at Coffee Meets Bagel, in their San Francisco office, right off of Market St., and had the opportunity to learn more about the leadership, team, and beliefs that enable Karim’s team to build a consistently high quality product. We covered many things including : Android vs IOS app. If you’re trying to build a global scale app, you should start on Android (80% of the market share globally). If your goal is start making money from rich Americans, than start on iOS. On pursuing a career in tech, and how San Francisco is great, but not the only place. Starting off in Portland, Karim worked out of hacker houses in Bali, Costa Rica, as well as working full time in Los Angeles for Tinder before making the move to San Francisco. At Coffee Meets Bagel, Karim manages an active team of engineers both in their offices in San Francisco, as well as remote teams. How the re-airing of a pitch to Mark Cuban on Shark Tank impacts traffic by 2 to 3 times the normal load. How building a side project with 10 people (!!!) impacted product quality and marketing, and ultimately affected the project’s ability to get funded. It’s so hard to get focus on delivering really good work while staying on top of all of the pieces together. What separates a hobby from a business is the willingness to sacrifice everything or figuring out how to do it full time. How collaboration yields great ideas but doesn’t all lead to a better product. What makes the difference is getting your head down and getting real work done. Although collaboration is great the frequency and attendee volume of collaborative meetings can strangle engineering productivity. How agile software is great in speeding time to market, but doesn’t always lead to the best result. In many cases agile software can be used to justify carelessness and hastily defined product requirements. We also want behind the scenes on philosophy including objective morality vs the golden rule and how this influences decision making both in professional and privately and when is it time to say “I quit.”