Jake, read this again in 1 year

Since 2023, I’ve been working with a delivery app called OrderReady, founded by a childhood friend. On paper (and for business registration reasons), my title is Chief Data Officer. In reality, my early contribution was mostly SQL queries and a few dbt models trying to rank homepage results. So yes—very cheap I mean chief.

I’ve always felt a bit weird about the title. Not because I don’t care, but because my contribution didn’t feel “executive” in the traditional sense. It was scrappy, practical, and mostly about making things slightly less broken than before.

Which, to be fair, is very startup.

An unexpected 2025 year-end company gathering

I went back to the Philippines for a working holiday this December 2025.
And like most companies, OrderReady had a year-end gathering to celebrate the past year. It's a no-brainer I should attend this so I did.
I expected the usual setup: food, drinks, small talk, then home before things got too loud.

It wasn’t that.

It was my first time meeting and celebrating with the riders—the people who actually make OrderReady work. The surprising part was that they knew my name, even though they’ve never worked with me directly, never sat in a meeting with me, and definitely never watched me overthink column names at 1 a.m.

That moment landed harder than I expected.

Most of my year-end gatherings over the years were with people sitting in front of laptops, talking about Jira tickets, roadmaps, and why something didn’t ship. This one felt different. Different stories, different energy, and a reminder that there’s a whole side of tech you rarely see when your world revolves around dashboards and pull requests.

Staying local, staying proud

I spent most of the night listening. A lot of the riders have been with OrderReady for four years or more. Long enough that they could have moved to foodpanda or Grab—but didn’t.

Hearing their reasons was quietly eye-opening.

Somewhere in those conversations, it clicked that there’s a real sense of pride in working for something local. Maybe this is something I forgot after moving to Germany. There’s something different about building a home-grown product with founders who actually know you—not because it’s written in a doc, but because they live in the same context.

It’s not just a job. It’s a shared story.

And I didn’t realise how much that mattered until that night.

What’s next?

After a few long conversations with my friend, we set some new goals for 2026. I still don’t really think of myself as a “real” CDO. My coding is scrappy at best, and a lot of my workflow still involves Googling things I should probably already know.

But the goals feel achievable. And the problems feel worth solving.

I’ve been an Engineering Manager for around four years now. Most of my time goes into helping other people build things—unblocking teams, reviewing plans, nudging projects forward. Somewhere along the way, I stopped building things for myself.

Working on OrderReady feels like getting a bit of that back. I don’t know how big this will get or how useful I’ll end up being, but that night—listening to the riders talk about their work—I remembered why I enjoyed building things in the first place.

I’m holding on to that for now.

We’ll see where it goes.