Tuesday 18th April, 5pm - 8pm 

Michael “Koz” Koziarski is currently the VP of architecture at Vend, but is arguably best known for being one of the core members of the Ruby on Rails team, and for his contribution to the NZ Startup community through his consultancy work and speaker engagements.

Koz started his career in the banking sector as a Java Architect. In 04 he came across the open source framework Ruby on Rails, things snowballed from there, and he spent the next six years working on a number of projects involving Rails, as a contractor or directly for various companies. In his consultancy capacity, he helped many startups improve their technology, team or processes, to help set them up for success.

After his stint as a consultant, he became a partner at Wellington-based software studio Southgate Labs, and was involved with several early stage angel investments with a variety of outcomes.

In 2015, Koz became the VP of Architecture for Vend and has overseen their technology transformation, one of his most notable achievements was overseeing the migration from dedicated hosting to AWS, a project completed in less than six months from the initial planning meetings with less than 1 hour of scheduled maintenance.

We'll be chatting to Koz about his journey, some of the lessons he learned along the way, the contrasts of early startups and growing ones, and tap into advice he would give the start-up community.

Agenda:

5pm: Networking with nibbles, wine and Garage Project Beer 

6pm: Fireside chat

7pm: Networking with nibbles, wine and  Garage Project Beer