William Ballance

👋 Hey, I'm William. My team and I design technology that combines communication psychology with AI. Want to write better emails faster? We built software for that. 👇

1. Install for free to use our AI Email Assistant at https://install.lavender.ai (for Gmail, Outlook 365, Outreach, and Salesloft)

2. Are you a student or unemployed? We give you Lavender for free until you have a full time job.

3. Want to start a startup one day? I write a lot about our startup journey + happy to help if I can.

4. Want to generate passive pipeline on autopilot? We built Ora, Lavender's new intelligent AI sales agent to help with just that. www.ora.im


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about me:

👨‍💻 I'm a sales rep turned startup founder. 

🇲🇽🗽🍑 I spent a year and a half remote working in Mexico. We built most of Lavender during this. I'm based in New York but we got our start in Atlanta. 

🎨 🏛 I've been designing software since I was a kid, but went to school to study Government and Economics. 

🌍 I'm passionate about entrepreneurship. I wrote my senior thesis on using micro-finance to encourage entrepreneurship and bottoms-up development of emerging economies.

🦊 I'm most proud of starting a series of campaigns to help save a historic women's college, Sweet Briar, from closing. 

👩‍🎓The school was saved by its alumnae, and this experience led me to leave my job and start my first startup: an alumni social chat and mobile fundraising app. 

🧠 Through that I was introduced to the cognitive sciences, met my co-founders, and pivoted. We built technology for marketers that leveraged personality and decision making science.

💜 COVID happened and we pivoted again, applying our communication psychology research to sales.

🙌 Now Lavender helps thousands of sales people around the world write better emails faster.

👉 Learn more about Lavender at www.lavender.ai and www.ora.im

Strategic Advisor

William M. Ballance

Pinkfish

Software Engineer

Lavender

- **First Full-Time hire at Lavender**: Played a pivotal role in the company's growth, driving it from seed funding to securing a $13 million Series A round.
- Engineered and sustained robust backend systems using Golang and Python, ensuring high performance and scalability.
- Managed databases and data storage solutions with MongoDB and Redis, optimizing for efficiency and reliability.
- Utilization of CI/CD pipelines with CircleCI, enabling seamless application deployments on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure. Containerized applications using Docker and ensured robust version control with Git.
- Successfully set up and maintained backend integrations with industry-leading platforms such as Gong, Hubspot, Salesforce, Outreach, and Salesloft. Developed comprehensive email and calendar integrations with Google and Microsoft.
- Implemented a MongoDB + BigQuery real-time bi-directional sync, enhancing data accuracy and accessibility.
- Established and optimized connections with data vendors like Clearbit, Apollo, and Exactbuyer, significantly enhancing profile enrichment features.
- Helped develop a high-performance enterprise dashboard and contributed to the redesign of the extension using React, Redux, and Context API. Managed frontend build processes with npm, Webpack, and Babel.
- Worked with advanced ML and deep learning models, including BERT, to deliver cutting-edge email analysis features. Tested and deployed Stanford's core NLP library with custom-trained data for various inference tasks.
- Adhered to Agile methodologies for efficient project management and practiced Test-Driven Development (TDD) to ensure robust and reliable code quality.
- Gained exposure to prompt engineering and the deployment of AI models, utilizing OpenAI's GPT models and Vellum AI to enhance product capabilities.

Freightgate

Automation tests using the robot framework with Selenium2Library. Visual AI testing using the Applitools python and Javascript SDKs. UI development in Sencha Ext JS and React JS.

Working on a data mining system by using Node.JS, Express, Puppeteer, Python
and MySQL to mine data by processing contents in different formats like
HTML, PDF, CSV, and EXCEL.

Created micro-services for our pdf report generating feature using Java
SpringBoot. DevOps with CVS, GIT, Maven, Jenkins, and JIRA

Exposure to detailed requirements analysis for software design, development,
testing, and deployment.

Assisted the system admin in maintaining our infrastructure at various data centers around Orange County.

Software Engineering Intern

Animesh is a Software/Data Engineering and Machine Learning Enthusiast. He has a background in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. Most recently, he joined the team at Lavender as a full-time Software Engineer. 

taplio

The Battle

William M. Ballance

Animesh Chaudhry

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