AGL 268: Douwe Maan

Born and raised in the Netherlands, Douwe was introduced to computers early by his father, and picked up programming at the age of nine.

Throughout high school, Douwe worked as a freelance software developer, building many websites, an iPhone jailbreak tweak with 300k downloads, the #1 (closed) most downloaded watchface for the original Pebble smartwatch, and two iPhone apps that got featured on the App Store.

While studying at Utrecht University, Douwe co-founded a SaaS startup that grew to $150k in ARR, which led to him joining GitLab in 2015 as employee number 10 after landing the parents of its co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij as customers.

Soon after, he hired and trained GitLab’s next 10 engineers and became its first development lead and engineering manager.

After graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Douwe spent six months traveling the world, visiting and working with 49 colleagues in 14 countries on 5 continents.

In late 2019, Douwe joined the internal Meltano project at GitLab as Engineering Lead to bring his experience building open source developer tools to the data space.

Soon after, he was asked to take over as General Manager, and quickly pivoted to focus on open source data integration, which led to Meltano picking up significant traction during 2020.

Douwe currently lives in Mexico City with his delightful wife, who he met on the aforementioned trip around the world, and their two cats.