Andy Tyra VP Engineering, Whereby

Company

Whereby are on a mission to give people the freedom to work where they thrive best. The Norwegian video platform founded in 2013 is taking on Zoom, Microsoft, and Google. With deep integrations with the likes of Miro, Google docs, Trello, and YouTube, Whereby’s easy to UX focused in-browser makes video meetings a far more straight forward and satisfying experience.

During the lockdown period, Whereby saw a massive surge in usage with the mass adoption of video meetings across the world. This growth led to the company raising a $12 million Series A funding round in March 2021 led by Point Nine and over 20 angel investors including founders from Miro, Typeform, GoCardless and Spotify.

Search Background

The massive growth spike during the lockdown Covid 19 pandemic saw Whereby increase ARR five-fold in 2020. To further capitalize on this growth opportunity, Whereby partnered with Erevena to bring in a VP of Engineering who would help the company scale both its engineering team and technology capabilities to meet the opportunity in the market.

Requirements

The VP Engineering would report directly to the CEO Øyvind Reed and would be responsible for taking a fully distributed technical team of 30 spread across the East Coast of the US and Europe and scaling the organization to 70 and above. In addition to this, the VP Engineering would be responsible for improving the product’s usability globally as well and guiding the build of a new enterprise-grade offering which includes further improving their Embedded/ White label product.

The search strategy involved an ambitious approach to the market, taking advantage of the huge surge in interest in the space. The aim was to explore a variety of areas from B2B SaaS and Consumer Platforms and specific Video & Audio Streaming environments. Because of the remote first nature of the business this was carried out across the US and Europe.

Result

From a shortlist that included options across Europe as well as potential relocation options in from the West Coast, Andy Tyra emerged as a fantastic fit for Whereby. Andy was Director for the Living Room App Platform at Amazon in London at the time where he led a sizable engineering and product management organisation responsible for the Prime Video customer experience on all devices which aren’t mobile, laptop or desktop. A seasoned Amazon veteran Andy ticked the boxes from a technical perspective and had also demonstrated his ability as an exceptional people leader. After joining the company in mid-2021, Andy would go on to be promoted to CPTO within his first year at the business.