I’d like to send an important and exciting update about the Fitocracy team. Moving forward, my cofounder, Richard Talens, will move from his position as CTO to Chief of Growth and Analytics. In his place, our senior engineer, Daniel Roesler, will be Fitocracy’s new official CTO.

Some History

This transition has been in the making for quite a while and it is worth providing some background information. When Richard and I originally started building Fitocracy, the role of CTO naturally went to Richard as he knew several programming languages and was able to pick up web development very quickly. He built the earliest versions of Fitocracy with impressive speed and without him, we wouldn’t have garnered the traction we did in 2011. But Richard’s heart has always been at the intersection of consumer behavior and data analysis - his Wharton concentration was in information management and he previously worked on campaign effectiveness and statistical analysis at comScore. Fortunately, once Daniel joined us as Senior Engineer in May 2011, Richard was able to start dedicating more of his time toward building our user base through data-driven experiments.

While Richard continued to develop Fitocracy with the rest of the team, it didn’t take long to see that Daniel had a strong passion and vision for the technical side of Fitocracy. As Daniel took on more of the technical leadership, Richard expressed a desire to start spending more of his time on user growth. As we were still only 3 people at the time, taking Richard off of development wasn’t a possibility quite yet.

Fortunately, the team has added on two more engineers since then. With a capable and growing engineering team in place, we decided that now was the time to make the switch. Moving forward, Richard will be leading the critical task of growing Fitocracy’s user base. In this role, he’ll continue to leverage his technical abilities to lead our distribution and retention efforts. Daniel, as CTO, will lead our engineering team to drive product development and our underlying software architecture.

Beefing Up!

Oh, and did I mention 2 engineers? Yup! We just brought on another new full timer to the Fitocracy team! Let’s all welcome Jay Patel as our newest backend developer!

Jay previously spent 4 years at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch as a senior application developer, where he worked on projects ranging across business intelligence platforms, Big Data analysis, and internal web app development. He also earned his BSE in Computer Engineering from UPenn and has studied subjects that make the rest of us feel inadequate as human beings.

He also has his own inspiring transformation story. After discovering StrongLifts and calorie counting, he started on his own journey toward better health and fitness.

This was Jay in 2008:

Jay more recently:

At Fitocracy, he’ll primarily focus on building new features and developing algorithms designed to make the user experience more contextual and individualized. We are super psyched to have him on board! You can check out his profile here.

-Brian