Founder & CEO at Ocoder
Ben Standefer
I'm a 3x founder. My previous company was Command E, a high-polish cloud search app which was funded by top Silicon Valley investors and acquired by Dropbox, where it became Dropbox Dash. Before that I was the 3rd engineer at Eventbrite and also worked at Digg.com and First Round Capital.
Questions & Answers
Why are you excited about your company/product?
Our vision is that in the future, Product Managers will be able to make changes to software apps on their own, without help from engineers. Being short on engineering resources sucks, and too many important priorities get cut from product roadmaps due to lack of engineering resources. Ocoder will enable Product Managers to make many changes on their own.
Can you share a distinctive achievement or highlight from your career?
I have three patents for my engineering work on distributed storage of location-based information. Processing location information (US9338594B1), Querying for devices based on location (US9553838B1), Using a polygon to select a geolocation (US9774696B1).
How is your team uniquely positioned to solve the problem you're tackling?
We systems engineering expertise around analyzing code in areas such as Language servers (LSP), tree-sitter, ctags, Chromedriver/UI testing. This stack can be run independent of an IDE and provide superior context to LLMs, resulting in a purpose-build UI for Product Managers that can still ensure the underlying code is correct.
What inspired you to start your business?
We hate the "priests" of the software engineering cathedral. The world has too many overpaid, prima donna software architects that act as gatekeepers to Product Managers. Changes to simple framework-based apps (Django, Rails, Laravel, Next.js, etc.) should be quick and easy, and not require bespoke software engineering.
What sets you apart from others in your industry?
Our agents can work on real-world, operational SaaS apps, and our UI is built specifically for Product Managers. We're not an IDE. Ocoder works even if you've never run `git clone` in your life.
