How to Actually Get Hired

Ellie is one of the most credentialed product leaders in Seattle's technology ecosystem, and her specific combination of experience is what makes her the right founder for Ridge at this moment. She holds a BS in Engineering and a BA in Policy from Rice University, followed by an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Her career began with a short stint at Microsoft before she joined Tableau Software, where she stayed for twelve years and rose to Senior Vice President of Product Development. Those twelve years span the entire formative arc of Tableau's growth: she was part of the core team that conceived, built, and launched both Tableau Public (the free community product that drove viral adoption) and Tableau Online (the cloud-hosted SaaS offering that drove enterprise subscription revenue). Her nickname within Tableau is "the Godmother of Tableau Public," which captures something important about her product instincts: she built the community product that made Tableau the default data visualisation vocabulary for an entire generation of analysts. She led product strategy and engineering across mobile apps, collaboration, search, and content experience during the period when Tableau went from a fast-growing startup to a Salesforce acquisition at $15.7 billion. She then became Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Salesloft, leading engineering for a sales workflow platform where she directly experienced the problem Ridge is solving: "I routinely experienced the problem where our team was creating real value for customers and had no good way to prove it. We would spend months building dashboards instead of focusing on what made us different." That quote, from the Ridge press release, is not a founder crafting a narrative. It is a CPO who spent months of her own team's engineering capacity building analytics dashboards that should have taken hours. Ridge is the product she wished she had at Salesloft. She is active on LinkedIn and has written thoughtfully about the transition from large company executive to early-stage founder.

Jeff Heer is, without overstating it, one of the most consequential computer scientists in the history of data visualisation. His academic pedigree is from UC Berkeley, where he completed his BS, MS, and PhD in Computer Science, and his career has spanned both pure research and applied commercial work in a way that is unusually rare. As a graduate student at Berkeley, he developed Prefuse and Flare, two of the first widely-used visualisation frameworks. He then joined Stanford's CS faculty as an assistant professor from 2009 to 2013, where he worked with Mike Bostock on the Protovis and D3.js visualisation systems. D3.js is now the foundation of almost every interactive data visualisation on the web. He moved to the University of Washington, where he co-directs the Interactive Data Lab and has continued a research programme that produced Vega, Vega-Lite, and most recently Mosaic, the open-source framework that Ridge's entire platform is built on. Mosaic is architecturally significant: it is an academic research output that enables highly interactive, browser-native analytics using DuckDB and WebAssembly, and it is now a production commercial product at Ridge. His research has received essentially every major award in the HCI and visualisation field: MIT Technology Review's TR35, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award, and induction into both the IEEE Visualization and ACM CHI academies. He was named an ACM Fellow in the 2024 class "for contributions to information visualization, human-centered data science, and interactive machine learning." His citation count on Google Scholar is 39,699, he is cited by researchers at Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and essentially every major technology company that builds data products. He co-founded Trifacta in 2012 with Joe Hellerstein and Sean Kandel, which built interactive data transformation tools and was acquired by Alteryx in 2022. His student list on his faculty page is itself a who's who of the data industry: Mike Bostock (D3.js, then New York Times, then Observable), Ravi Parikh (Heap, then Airplane, then Airtable), Dominik Moritz (now CMU faculty), Arvind Satyanarayan (now MIT faculty). When Jeff Heer founds a company, the research that powers it has been proven over decades in both academic and commercial settings. Ridge is not a bet on whether the technology works. The technology already works. The bet is whether it can be packaged and distributed at commercial scale.