-: My name is Shawn Vo and I'm the CTO
and co-founder of Axel Payments.
So, our company is a financial technology platform
that is specifically targeting the transportation industry.
So we basically help transportation company
get the working capital they need to
basically move goods all around the world.
So before this company specifically
we were working in the logistics space,
so we were doing a lot of stuff in the transportation space.
We raised a couple of venture rounds
from transportation investors and
then we gradually learned that a lot of
these companies have a lot of problems with working capital.
So they are basically constraint
from growing by how much money they have in the bank.
So we decided that, hey we can build a software solution,
pair it with this financial product
that is able to solve a lot of their problems.
SO, from my perspective I balance a lot
of my time between working on the business,
building the technology, managing engineers,
hiring a bunch of people,
making sure that customers are happy.
So it's a lot of different things right now,
but as we scale and as we grow-up
I feel like my role is going to be
more specific in terms of product and engineering.
But since we are relatively small
you kinda have to do everything.
As a team we split a lot of responsibilities.
The ones that I'm more focused on
is basically making sure that the product works.
Like we can build the technology
and we're building new features that customers really want,
things are reliable,
we're sending money to the right bank accounts.
You know, there's no errors in the system.
I also manage a remote engineering team,
it happens to be in Vietnam, that's a 12 hour difference.
So my hours is probably pretty unusual,
but for example, I'll normally have meetings
starting from 7 a.m. or so,
because it's like 7 p.m. their time.
And then, some engineers actually prefer working at night
so sometimes I'll stay up really late
and have late meetings too.
So it's pretty stretched out but I think
the cool thing about managing my own scheduled
is that I'll just take random gaps
during the day if I need to.
You know, I don't have a strict time,
so I'll make sure I have time for lunch,
have dinner with my girlfriend, do all that kinda stuff,
and then probably continue working throughout the day.