I met John at one of Zap's events. People had been telling me to meet him for three years before that, and I'd never followed up. Should have.
Within five minutes I knew two things: he understood what I was building better than anyone I'd talked to, and he had real thoughts on how to make it better. I'd talked to people deeper in data than John who never saw it. You have to be in the AI game and know data to see where this is going. John lives at that intersection.
Courting him took months. He's done early-stage before, so he knew exactly what he was signing up for. That's what made it remarkable that he said yes.
Six months in, the thing I keep coming back to: Watt has two CTOs now. John and I can each take either side of the problem (data or delivery) at any moment. It's a superpower very few startups get to have.
And he brings something Jared and I don't: real perfectionism. Being great at the tactical details is the difference between saying you're a utility company and being one. John is a critical piece of how we get there.
What John will be focused on
As Chief Architect, John leads the engineering team responsible for how Watt's data reaches our customers — through MCP, APIs, and the primitives that come after them.
That means owning the delivery layer end-to-end: the customer-facing product, the developer experience, and the engineering rigor underneath it all. Since joining, he's already rebuilt our shipping infrastructure from the ground up — CI/CD, full testing, staged rollouts, end-to-end preview environments. Quality at speed, not quality or speed.
What's next is bigger: building a world-class data delivery experience for AI agents, the layer that turns Watt's reasoning graph into real customer value.
Welcome, Johnzilla.