Meet Ana Martins de Carvalho, CTO & Co-founder of Anansi

We recently interviewed Co-founder and CTO, Ana Martins de Carvalho. Ana is our software genius and oversees the engineering team here at Anansi.

Read on to find out what’s on Ana’s bookshelf, her personal journey towards becoming our CTO and what it’s like managing a remote, global team.

Megan and I met when we were both in London. I was working in banking at the time and she’d just seen a talk on how to use chatbots to simplify the insurance process. We didn’t end up discussing chatbots too much but we became  interested in how we could use data to facilitate getting a quote for insurance. 

I’d recently quit my full-time job to start freelancing, I had recently been through the pain of filling out many insurance forms at the time. We decided to team up and build an initial prototype that automatically predicted what insurance a business would need based on available information. We applied for a startup accelerator in Zürich and got our first paid project with an insurance company. Anansi was born and we both committed to the business full-time.We continued iterating on the product and the concept of automated insurance, which took us where we are now, focusing on goods in transit.

I studied Physics at university and there were some courses in the Computer Science department. Those quickly became my favourite. I enjoyed building small systems, simple games, messaging applications and playing with machine learning. Instead of focusing on theory, I was able to create things that could have an impact in the real world, now. I realised that software allows you to work in many different domains and, as someone who’s curious about how things work, that idea of doing this for a living attracted me a lot.

My first ever job was just outside London at a startup web development agency. I started my love affair with Python/Django and then moved on to work with different products over time. One of these being a fintech startup, where I essentially built their MVP. This experience geared me more towards companies with a solid product, places where I could go beyond the build and learn to maintain the software. I then worked in London in the Fintech/Banking space, where I was first exposed to working with microservices, high performance infrastructures and development good practices. I witnessed first hand how data was being used to power new, innovative fintech products, and this experience eventually inspired me to go my own way and create Anansi with Megan.

Engineering is not an isolated domain. All of our decisions are geared towards making the life of our merchants and teammates easier. Engineering is the closest team to the product itself, the data, and the bugs, which is valuable when coming up with new features, smarter ways to implement processes, and provide feedback on the wider business strategy. Beyond that, the day-to-day involves keeping the platform running, implementing new features, caring for the infrastructure and maintaining the codebase. It’s a fun place to be, working in a small, agile team, and having the freedom to be creative and find innovative solutions to problems that inevitably arise.

You need to be creative with the resources that you have and be comfortable with acting outside of your area of expertise. You start with a big vision and then you need to strip it down to its minimum viable product and work from there. And this happens across all sections of the business: you have a great idea for a product, but you need to choose the one feature that will make the most impact to start. You know the great tech infrastructure you’d like to build but you need to consider the go to market time. You want your message to reach as many as possible so you need to come up with alternative communication strategies. I’d say this is challenging but also very rewarding because you start questioning some of your past assumptions, you learn a lot outside of your comfort zone and you get to participate in the journey and help the company grow into the vision. We’ve also worked really hard to create a healthy, positive work culture, have an incredibly kind, thoughtful group.

Being a developer in a startup is very interesting – you get to wear many hats. Especially in early stage startups, there are no dedicated frontend/backend developers, QAs, DevOps or even product managers sometimes, so you can gain a deeper understanding of the whole development process. Discussing features, finding bugs, planning tasks, coding, reviewing, testing, deploying, it’s all part of a developer’s day-to-day. You get to shape this process and see it evolve over time. The most exciting thing for me right now is intertwined with how we grow as a company. That  new customer signing up and breaking things in the app, app performance when usage increases, new processes necessary as new team members join. We’re now a team of 4 and everyone who joins brings new energy and ideas that we can learn from.

We look for someone who can reason about software problems and is product-oriented. By product oriented I mean someone who’s interested in the business proposition, understands where we’re going and is able to think critically about what we’re implementing. As said earlier, working at a startup means wearing many hats, so even though software engineering will be the main responsibility, I’m looking for someone who’s excited about the wider business too.

This is the prime time to get into a tech role for one reason: everyone is hiring. This is the best time to find a company that aligns with your values and can offer a valuable experience where you can grow and learn.

I’d say communication in its various forms is the most important thing in a remote team. Everything needs to be very clear, there should be a handbook that documents company processes, there should be a collaborative culture where everyone feels free to give feedback and there should be a way to celebrate company values and culture to keep the team united in a mission. I’d say most office based companies rely on the physical space to convey the sense of unity, in a remote company, you need to be intentional in how you incorporate your values and bring people together around a shared goal.

In the beginning, Megan and I were responsible for all aspects of the business. We bootstrapped and walked the first steps towards building a product, finding insurance capacity and getting investment. It is very rewarding seeing those different departments grow inside Anansi as new team members take on those responsibilities. We now have a much clearer product, a stronger value proposition, and an amazing team that can bring our collaborative vision to life. 

It’s very exciting to think how much room there is to grow in Engineering, given how much we’re learning with our first customers and partners. New exciting features are in the pipeline, the infrastructure is evolving and the team will be evolving with it into a different configuration. If I had to name one thing, I’d say I’m most excited about discovering how we’ll be able to use the data we’re currently gathering to power our future processes – better analysis of risk for a specific business or carrier, more efficient monitoring of parcels and a fairer pricing for our merchants.

Tech evolves very rapidly and it’s hard to keep up with everything. I do keep an eye on the news once in a while and investigate if anything catches my eye . A good time to do a more in-depth search is when we need to implement a new feature, or integrate a new partner. it’s a good time to sense check what we’re doing, what other people are doing and what the latest trends are.

I feel very lucky that we’ve managed to hire such incredible people at this point – both from a technical but also human standpoint. Everyone is so supportive and always ready to help. There is real collaboration and we all discuss the wider strategy and what’s happening across the business every week. We also have team dailies where we get to say good morning to everyone which sets a good tone for the day. We feel strongly about self care, and self care Friday’s every other week where it’s optional to work. We all have the same mission and values and that shows. Our first ever team holiday is booked in Portugal in April and I can’t wait to see everyone in person.

Insight, by Dr Tasha Eurich. Also recommend her Ted talk on self awareness.