Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5Look for the Pain

Isaac Saldana

Isaac is the cofounder and founding CEO of SendGrid, a Techstars accelerator company from 2009 that provides an email service that solves the problems faced by companies sending application-generated transactional email. Since completing the Techstars accelerator in 2009, the company had a meteoric rise and now sends email on behalf of more than 150,000 customers. SendGrid was the first company from any accelerator program to go public when it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2017 (NYSE: SEND).

I have always been interested in solving complicated problems and am naturally passionate about scalability and complex engineering issues. I enjoy using technologies such as Hadoop for massive data analysis, Memcached for distributed caching, and Twisted for event-driven programming. Early in my software engineering career I landed positions as a CTO in multiple startups. The more I dealt with engineering problems, the less I wanted to be engaged with users or any other nontechnical problem. I strongly believed that my time was best spent on solving really difficult technical problems instead of dealing with all those pesky customers.

One day I was in the process of moving our static files to Amazon S3 to solve some scalability issues with our website when one of those annoying users notified us that the emails that our application was generating were not getting through to his Yahoo! Mail inbox. Off I went to solve this seemingly trivial ...