Bio
Seth started programming on an Apple II in 1989, and got his first full-time coding job building websites as a 16-year-old in 1996 (when JavaScript was pretty much just for making button hover effects). Since then he’s gotten a degree in aerospace engineering, worked in the life sciences and finance, and for most of the past decade, held technical leadership roles in various web software startups in NYC.
Seth is passionate about leadership and enjoys mentoring and advising engineering VPs and CTOs on problems around hiring practices, organization design, and working with the other members of the exec team. He also tackles the problem from the other end by advising non-technical CEOs on how to work better with their technical leaders. Seth loves working with smart, ethical people to build things he’s proud of – which basically means things that work and create value for customers rather than just extracting it. (Seth is not a fan of zero-sum capitalism.)
Seth enjoys throwing himself into difficult challenges at work, and enjoys recuperating from that by reading, cooking, challenging bike rides, building things out of stone, and going on hikes and road trips with his wife and young son. After forty years spent mostly on the East Coast, Seth and his wife were yearning to move out West and start exploring, and during the pandemic they saw their chance and took it, and haven’t looked back.
What are you up to?
After being fed up with the over-complexity of tools like Asana, Monday, and ClickUp while looking for a simple way to stay on top of my workload as a manager – and collaborate with other managers – I co-founded Flat with a colleague in 2021. Since then we’ve been rapidly iterating on the product and delighting early users. You can check it out at https://flat.app.
And last year I met the folks at Oregon Venture Fund and was really impressed with what they were doing, so I decided to get involved and have really been enjoying getting to know more people in the PDX tech startup scene that way.
Why Portland?
My wife and I had visited friends in PDX several times when we were living in NYC and we both immediately loved the area. We ended up settling in Corvallis but I’m in Portland regularly for meetings and events, and I’ve really been enjoying the food scene (especially ramen, e.g. Wu-Rons). Coming from NYC, great ramen is a must-have for me! We love spending time on the coast and visit at least once a month.
Links
- Personal site: https://sethpurcell.com
- New venture: https://flat.app
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethpurcell/
Interested in being featured?
Silicon Florist introduces one person, each day of the work week, to the Portland startup community. If you’re interested in being one of those folks, please let us know a little bit more about you and you’ll be selected at random to be featured.
