About
Hi! And welcome to my little piece of cyberspace.
My name is Kate Matsudaira. I currently live and work in Seattle, WA.
My background is in technology and computer science. Although I have spent the last few years on the management side of things. I specialize in building and operating large scale web applications/sites. Lately I have been working with SaaS (software as a service) applications and cloud computing. I have extensive experience building and managing high performance teams that create really amazing technology to solve important problems. While I don’t believe there is a one-size-fits-all development process I am a big fan of agile development practices, but have experience and opinions on lots of other methods.
I spend my days working as the VP Engineering for the very exciting Decide. In the past, I have worked at several great companies including Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and Amazon.com. More recently I have tended to veer towards the start-up world where 1 year is like 5 years in big company time. I have worked on large scale platforms (most recently in online video and search) but have also helped build smaller high traffic e-commerce sites. I have held roles as developer, project manager, product manager, and of course people manager. Although the last 5+ years I have been a VPE/CTO for SEOmoz, and prior to that Delve Networks (acquired by Limelight).
Thanks to my accomplishments I was even ranked as one of the 100 women in Seattle Tech in May 2009. And I was also so honored to be featured in Geekwire, with this profile in May 2011.
Outside of tech I love fashion, glitter, cupcakes and cotton candy. Oh and of course my doggies. You will seldom find me without my high heels, giant handbags, and iPhone . Besides my love of all things glamorous, I am still a geek at heart (ask me to tell you some math jokes or raid with you in a game of WoW).
Currently I am working full time and am not seeking any outside opportunities; although I am always willing to help out as time allows–so if you have an interesting project feel free to drop me a line. I also seem to do a lot of speaking, and enjoy guest writing as time permits.
To learn more about me, you can read my blog or follow me on twitter, or drop me a note via email!
Other interesting press and events I have been involved with:
- NY Times coverage from a panel on cloud computing
- O’Reilly video interview from Velocity 2011
- Mentored at Seattle Startup Weekend in June 2011
- Spoke on Software Failures at Velocity in June 2011
- Speaking at OSCON 2011 on Big Data for Less and Scaling Rails
- Video of a panel at Lean Startup Seattle: Building on a Great Idea (geek wire coverage of the panel, including more pics)
- Speaking at the Seattle AWS users group in August 2011
- Speaking at SurgeCon on Scaling and participating in a panel on Big Data in the Cloud in September 2011
- Velocity online conference, October 2011 – watch the video here!
- Judging Startup Weekend November 2011
- A fun spotlight profile on Venture Alley
- An article on Geekwire about my November 2011 career change….
- A guest post on Smart Blogs about Leadership and Retaining Top Talent
- Here are a few posts I wrote on the Moz Developer blog (when I was the VP Engineering there):
