James Smith, British entrepreneur and software engineer based in San Francisco.
I'm the co-founder of Bugsnag, a popular real-time crash detection service for mobile and web applications, with Simon Maynard. I previously led the product team as CTO of Heyzap, helping scale the company to over 8 million users.
In the past, I co-founded and built Sponsor-Me, the first social donation application for the Facebook platform and later created WeGot.tv, a media discovery app which was acquired in 2009.
I've also built a number of popular open-source projects which you can find on GitHub.
Bugsnag is “mission control” for software stability.
Over 4,500 engineering teams such as Airbnb, Pandora, Yelp, Cisco, and Lyft trust Bugsnag as their software stability source of truth. We process over 1 billion crash reports every day from applications worldwide, with tens of thousands of software engineers using our dashboards every week.
Heyzap’s mobile apps had over 10 million users and millions of mobile installations and received funding Y Combinator, Union Square Ventures, Ashton Kutcher and others. Heyzap's profitable ads platform was used by leading games companies such as King (Candy Crush Adventure) and Zynga.
As first employee and CTO, I was responsible for making product direction decisions, prioritizing engineering work, managing the engineering team, scaling the Heyzap mobile applications and website to millions of users, hiring new talent, and developing new features for the mobile applications or web backend in Ruby, Java or JavaScript.