Expo Team Member: Jason Riggs

At the very first Expo holiday dinner — which was basically just a few people and an OpenTable reservation at an Italian restaurant — about halfway through the meal, someone whimsically said: “We should get Jason here,” and so we called him and he showed up for the second half of that dinner, and it was great.

Months and months later, after he’d helped build the team and guide the project strategically, that same feeling of “we should really get Jason here” was something we started to feel all the time. Now he’s the head of partnerships at Expo as part of the team.

Jason can do many things extraordinarily well. Like really really well. He’s a great programmer — he even TAs the famous iPhone course at Stanford. He’s an extraordinary Rocket League player. And a music producer. But the thing that stands out about him on the team is that whenever there is a problem that someone doesn’t even know how to approach, much less solve, we seek Jason’s counsel. He has a way of seeing the big picture and thinking of things in so many different ways that he’s wise even in domains that he’s not deeply familiar with and doubly so in the areas that overlap with his obsessions.

Before teaching at Stanford and working on Expo, Jason was part of the awesome Fretboard Labs along with Ben and Jesse, and worked with Max Levchin at HVF, and ran business development at Clinkle. Before all that, he studied symbolic systems at Stanford, and grew up in Dallas where he must have picked up the charm and sociability that makes him the rare triple threat: someone who’s good at talking to people, and also good at understanding and programming software systems (and is also just a really good dude).