More than a hundred technology companies.
Amity is Christian Sykes and Alina Bochkacheva. We have shipped together for years, argued a great deal, and been wrong more than once. Anything we tell you has already survived an argument between us.
Christian Sykes
Twenty years in software, from product management into commercial, then finance, strategy and running the business. Five years as both COO and CPO of a New Zealand safety technology company, through 40x growth and a full repositioning, a World Health Organization reference and a Gartner recommendation inside six months.
Before that, running New Zealand for Datalicious and for Experian, and product, key accounts and partnerships across the United Kingdom and Europe for Hitwise.
He teaches Export Essentials for New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and coaches founders through Startup Aotearoa. MBA from Otago. Coming up through foster care in an unglamorous corner of London left him with an unusually high tolerance for chaos.
Alina Bochkacheva
Product and design leader. One of the early designers at Duo Security in Michigan, acquired by Cisco for 2.35 billion dollars. Design Team Lead at Trade Me, New Zealand's largest marketplace. Head of Product Design at a New Zealand safety technology company, where she led design on a contact tracing product endorsed by the New Zealand government.
She started as a software developer, which is why her work tends to survive contact with an engineering team rather than starting an argument with one.
Her thing is the hard problem. Taking something nobody can quite articulate, researching it properly, and making it obvious. She builds the practice as well as the product, so teams keep doing it well after she has gone.
The people you meet are the people who do the work.
Nobody learns on your time, and nothing gets handed down to somebody junior once the engagement starts.