🧠 Meet our Co-Founder and CTO, aka the master brains behind our thoroughly built product, Albert Gomez!

Our Co-Founder and CTO Albert currently lives in Netherlands with his family. He has 10 years of professional experience in Software Development and loves solving complex problems and turning them into simple solutions.

He recently attended his first charter event, ICE, in December and his focus is on leading the Dev team while constantly working on new features for Floatist.

What are the main company core values that you stand by?

Be agile in everything you do: a mix of 'we learn by doing, one step at the time' and 'we question assumptions and get feedback early'.

For me, these two values mean the following two things:

• Make the best decision you can today, with the information you have from yesterday, but be ready to redefine priorities tomorrow.
• React fast to customer inputs, and deliver prototypes as fast as you can to production.
• Translate customer requests to the correct implementation by asking the right questions early and get feedback from them every step of the way is of utmost importance, especially for us in the early phase that we are in. By doing this, release, iterate and repeat until the product is perfect is how we have gotten so far so quick! Due to our technology choices, the fact that we are using Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) instead of native apps, allows us to deliver new functionalities in hours without having to wait for app store approvals which can take weeks.*

What has been your biggest challenge leading this startup?

There is a big difference between working for a big tech corporation and creating a SaaS product from scratch in a small team. In big corporations, someone already thought about X and Y. When starting something by yourself, you have a world of possibilities, and choosing the correct path is challenging, as in the development world not all ways lead to Rome.

If you ask me, the biggest challenge is to become someone who knows something about everything, being an all-decider and all-doer. This last year I've had to learn so many things along the way: 3 new programming languages (because the ones I knew did not have the right ecosystem to create Floatist), 20+ of frontend and backend frameworks, DevOps tooling, AWS infrastructure, among many others. And I loved it!

Another important challenge has been to find the right balance between launching the product fast enough, but make it in such a way that the core is well architected. This is important because while our user base grows our platform needs to scale with it. We spent extra time making sure the fundament is done right, and the result of that is that we have created an extremely well designed app as well as development environment, ready for accelerated growth in the next years.

Which main goal do you have for Floatist?

I want people to think about Floatist not as just a software solution for internal operations, but as a means to an end of innovating the whole customer experience. Fleet operators should be able to concentrate on doing what they do, and clients are delighted by a great end-to-end experience.