Redmart’s new head of tech spent nights stamping envelopes for his first startup

Patrick Teo. Photo credit: Redmart.

Redmart’s new top engineer and product person cut his teeth in Silicon Valley, working for Amazon and Facebook. But before that, Patrick Teo was a founding member of a startup in the Valley – a photography publishing service called Shutterfly.

That was 1999, the era of the “dotcom boom” in the US – and the peak before the plunge of the 2001 bust.

“Digital cameras were in vogue [then]. We thought, where do you get your photos printed with a digital camera?” Teo tells Tech in Asia. The startup allowed users to have their digital images printed and later made into all kinds of physical products like greeting cards and calendars.

Shutterfly made it through the 2001 crisis successfully, achieved profitability, and listed on NASDAQ in 2006.

Walking through the Valley

Teo went on to product and engineering positions at Amazon and Facebook. At chez Bezos, his mission was to build the company’s new music streaming product. He started at Amazon in 2009, when digital music basically involved using iTunes to download files onto your iPod. Online streaming was still in its infancy but always-connected smartphones were coming into their own.

“The project was, essentially, to take advantage of the connectivity of mobile to build a cloud-based streaming system,” Teo says.

Sounds pretty straightforward, but the challenge was not insignificant. The project was based in San Francisco, where Seattle-headquartered Amazon didn’t have a large presence at the time.

Teo sees tech like machine learning and artificial intelligence as an important part of Redmart’s product.

“One of the major challenges of building Amazon’s music service was hiring the large team that would build it. Amazon was competing against startups and other large tech companies for talent,” Teo says. With the company’s offices all the way up north in the state of Washington, the Bay Area-based team would have to coordinate with the mothership remotely.

So the company decided to make this part of its brand to help recruitment. “People who joined were able to have a larger impact and greater autonomy. Plus, they were able to build many new capabilities from the ground up using various AWS tools and technologies. This brand was used to recruit through industry hires, internal transfers, and universities,” he explains.

After spending four years there, Teo decided to look for new challenges. He found what he was looking for at Menlo Park, with Facebook’s “move fast” approach. Teams would try new ideas for six to 12 months, some of them involving major features, and then strike them down if they were not working and moving on. “There was constant experimentation,” Teo says.

For example, one of his teams once spent six months on a feature that helped users share their status update more easily. The feature rolled into several countries but it didn’t make the impact the team hoped for, so it got scrapped.

Facebook’s “hacker culture” also appealed to Teo. He recalls a meeting with a colleague who worked in business development when he first started at the social network. “When we met, he looked tired and I learned it was because he had spent the night before in a hackathon team, hacking on some new iOS feature the team was passionate about,” he relates.

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