Hilary Gould

Get to know Hilary Gould

What are you looking for in your next role?

I would love to end up at a tech company with a positive culture. It is important to me that the product is something I am invested in and feel passionate about building. I would be interested in companies that have a lot of room for growth and internal mobility as I could see myself wanting to combine my customer facing background with my new technical skills into a cross functional role in the future.

Why did you decide to change career and/or educational paths? What was your prior path and how did you end up down that road initially?

Prior to Launch, I worked in Implementation at various SaaS startups ranging from seed funding to Series E. I really enjoyed setting customers up for success in our platform and found I particularly enjoyed the technical aspects. I decided that I wanted to make a change to a more technical, less customer facing role which is how I found Launch!

Where have you been involved in the tech community (events attended, volunteer activities, etc.)?

Throughout my career in tech, I have participated in various women at [company] groups. I have enjoyed these groups and hope to continue participating in these groups and other mentorship opportunities during my next venture.

What has been the most fulfilling aspect of your journey towards becoming a web developer? What's been your biggest challenge and how have you overcome it?

I really enjoy the “ah ha” moment when something clicks. I particularly enjoy when I am able to refresh the page or run the code and have the validation that what I worked on is working properly. Sometimes it’s challenging for me to know where to start. I find that it helps to pause and break the problem down into small chunks and focus on one thing at a time.

If you had an unlimited budget and resources, what would you build?

I am a frequent Venmo user, but have noticed that the apps for splitting bills are not up to par. I would love to create a technology that can read an itemized receipt and allow you to divvy up the items and tax/tip and send it to your friends (or even directly charge them on Venmo!). I've seen a ton of apps that do this, but none seem to do it well.