Interview with Juan Pablo Buritica Vice President of Engineering at Splice

Vidal: Well, thanks. Good morning, Juan Pablo. Thank you so much for speaking to me today.



JUAN PABLO: Morning, Vidal. How are you?



Vidal: I’m great, thanks. Could you maybe start, maybe tell people a little about your current role and where you’re located?



JUAN PABLO: Sure. I live in New York City. I moved here from Colombia about 10 years ago. I’m currently the VP of Engineering at a company called Splice, which we like to say we’re a music company with a technology team. We build tools, software, and services for musicians and music producers.



What’s your background and how did you get into management?



Vidal: All right. I know you have a little bit of an unusual background. Could you share with people your background, and how you got into management?



JUAN PABLO: Sure. Yes, it is more unusual than it tends to be. I do not have any formal Computer Science training, other than when I got my computer at 13 and started discovering the phreaking books, and the hacking books, and the [inaudible 00:01:05] books, and just playing around with those. I pursued a career in Pharmacy, in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and when I was … I think I was 23, I moved to the States to finish my degree in Pharmacy, it was around the time where the economy went crashing.



JUAN PABLO: I had to make a living, so I had dabbled in the culinary arts. I have a diploma in World Cuisine. I went back to the kitchen. I led the kitchen for an Italian restaurant, about 15 people, in Fort Lauderdale for a while, until the real state crisis also crashed us. And then, had to find a way to pay rent. So, I ended up making websites for people. I had already built a couple of Myspace pages and dabbled in HTML and CSS because I had a band back home. This allowed me to start paying the bills and I discovered there was a tech industry. I joined a startup in Miami, which was my first startup experience. It was a long distance startup. We offered free long distance in exchange of hearing ads and that was tailored towards Latin America immigrants, mostly.



Vidal: Got it.



JUAN PABLO: From there, I discovered an actual industry and realized that Florida wasn’t necessarily a center for technology, so I moved to New York. Since then, I’ve worked for a comic startup, for a advertising and publishing startup, for a ride-sharing startup and lately a music startup. In addition to that, around halfway through my tech career I kept bumping into leadership positions without really wanting them. As being someone who liked to be in the back of the house, the kitchen, I really didn’t … I like to say I didn’t like people, but it wasn’t the case. I wasn’t seeking to be in charge, but I kept running into those opportunities.



JUAN PABLO: I think when I was at Onswipe, which was this publishing startup, I embraced leadership. I said, “Okay, I keep finding myself here. This means something, I’m going to take these roles and I have to learn about it.” And that’s when I switched careers and took my management position as a … I saw myself as a junior manager and I started trying to see who I could learn from and how I could learn from, the same way I already learned JavaScript.



What are the biggest challenges you face?



Vidal: Okay. That’s really inspiring, the way you came basically from being a chef to VP of engineering now in Splice. I saw your talk at CodeClimate recently. You were talking about using data and all data.