Jonathan Oliver

As the founder of Smarty, Jonathan provides a great deal to the company. Not only is Jonathan incredibly skilled technically, he also has the incredible leadership ability to see the bigger picture and make the right decision for the future.

When Jonathan first started studying for a degree in Computer Science, he quickly noticed that the required readings were either books that he had already read, or books written by authors that he personally knew. Jonathan quickly realized that, while a college degree might be the path normally taken, his skills were already up to the task of trying things out on his own. He soon started successfully consulting for e-commerce companies at the very beginnings of e-commerce, and found that his instincts about his education were correct.

During this same time, Jonathan not only built several e-commerce platforms for other companies, he started to experiment in entrepreneurship himself. It was during this time that he realized that companies are as good as the people that are in them. At the time, many companies simply thought of employees as a commodity. Jonathan, however, saw that if you treat employees as colleagues and treat those colleagues well, that they in turn would treat customers well. This vision for people practices has helped grow Smarty into a business that Jonathan and his colleagues truly care to see succeed.

Smarty has since grown into a highly successful company that not only strives to be on the cutting edge of people practices, but technical practices as well. Early on, Jonathan saw the benefit of distributed systems. He was both a pioneer in CQRS/Event Sourcing as well as even hosting a successful podcast all about distributed systems. It's thanks to this technical vision that Smarty is able to handle tens of billions of transactions each day with virtually no downtime.