# Aaron Gotwalt > Personal portfolio and blog. Software engineering, product development, and technology. ## Blog Posts - [Luxury Software](/blog/2026-02-09-luxury-software.md): I've been shipping software for 25 years. Almost all of it was terrible. That's about to change. - [Why Doma, Why Now](/blog/2025-12-15-why-doma-why-now.md): Smart locks and doorbells have reached their final form, which is exactly why it's time to build something new. - [A robot house needs arms and legs](/blog/2025-05-22-house-needs-arms-and-legs.md): doing > thinking - [Joining Doma](/blog/2025-04-07-doma.md): I'm excited to share that I've joined Doma Home as Chief Technology Officer, working alongside founders Jason Johnson and Yves Béhar to reimagine what smart home technology can be. - [Sonos Might be Unfixable (But For Other Reasons)](/blog/2024-08-26-sonos.md): Sure, the software might be bad, but maybe the premise is ultimately flawed. - [New Site](/blog/2024-07-17-new-site.md): A new site for a new chapter. - [Swimming](/blog/2019-01-16-swimming.md): It took me until somewhere in my Junior year at college to realize that I was just hyperventilating, that I didn't have a heart condition, and that I could run more than two miles without feeling like death. I peeled those electrocardiogram sensors off of my chest, went outside into the cold, and really haven't stopped running since. The ghosts of that time still linger -the feeling of futility during a cross country race in slushy north-eastern woodlands as a teenager is probably what prevents me from doing anything competitive to this day. I'll tell you that it's because running is for me, an act of meditation, but there's another story under the surface. - [A Brief Memorial](/blog/2018-06-16-a-brief-memorial.md): It’s June 16, and my grandfather’s funeral just took place on the other side of the continent. He was a kind and loving man. He outlived his siblings, his first wife (my maternal grandmother), and so many of his peers that all went to World War II together, never to be seen again. He was a child of the depression, a voice of frugality and common sense, but was the first to help me chase this weird career I’ve had. - [Shared Out](/blog/2017-06-25-shared-out.md): I joined Twitter on July 17, 2006. I’m user #1888. I took a photo of Kevin and Mike as they were trying to keep their servers up on the first day of Instagram’s public launch (note: both have upgraded their wardrobes since). I used it when it was called Burbn. I didn’t go to an Ivy League school so I couldn’t be on the cusp of Facebook’s launch, but I knew about it at the time. I was there. - [A New Years Resolution](/blog/2017-01-03-new-years-resolution.md): San Francisco is one of the most amazing places in the world you can live today for tons of reasons, but after eight years here, it’s clear to me that community really isn’t one of them. This is the town where best friends try schedule dinners once a quarter, replying “yes” on an event invite just means you might think about it, and people move so frequently that you’re often better off meeting SF acquaintances in some mutually-agreed-upon destination like NYC or London. - [Sounds of 2016](/blog/2016-12-20-sounds-of-2016.md): These aren’t the best songs of this year, or the only ones I’ll remember, but this collection of songs are the ones that found me at meaningful points along the way. - [Bay to Breakers, by the Wifi Numbers](/blog/2016-05-16-bay-to-breakers.md): I set up a Wifi access point over Fell Street in the panhandle for Bay to Breakers, and left an open SSID for “#SfWifi”, which is used in all San Francisco parks that offer free internet access. I figured it’d be an easy one to measure traffic as people ran / walked / staggered by my house. ## Projects - [Haptic Communicator](/projects/wearable.md): You know no matter where we are, we're always touching by underground wires. - [Ghosty](/projects/project-2.md): A ghost to haunt your friends' Sonos houses. ## Work History ### Doma Home CTO (2025-04-01 – Current) Leading engineering at Doma Home, building a new hardware platform for the smart home alongside Jason Johnson and Yves Béhar. Doma sits at the intersection of three things that are extremely hard for AI today: design, craft, and hardware. We're not building another app-controlled deadbolt. We're building integrated robotic devices that understand how a household moves through space — a door that doesn't wait for you to ring the doorbell. The engineering challenges span embedded systems, computer vision, industrial design for mass production, and building software that anticipates rather than reacts. ### South Park Commons Member (2024-07-01 – 2025-01-31) Spent six months between companies exploring ideas at SPC. Dug deep into the future of fitness, AI support for aging in place, and what a post-LLM product development workflow actually looks like in practice. ### Evernow Co-Founder / CTO (2019-03-01 – 2024-04-01) Co-founded and led engineering at Evernow for five years, building a telemedicine platform for evidence-based menopause and aging care. We grew from an idea to a team of 50+ serving thousands of patients across the US. I built the initial product end-to-end — patient intake, provider tooling, pharmacy integrations, subscription management — and scaled the engineering team as we grew. Healthcare software is a particular kind of hard: regulatory constraints, real clinical stakes, and patients who need things to work the first time. It taught me more about building reliable systems than anything else I've done. ### Doctrly Co-Founder / CTO (2017-04-01 – 2018-04-01) Built tools for hospital security teams to automatically redact personally identifiable information from data transfers between devices and services. Healthcare data breaches are almost always preventable — Doctrly was an attempt to stop them before they happen by making redaction automatic rather than aspirational. ### Projector Co-Founder / CTO (2014-11-01 – 2017-03-01) Built a programmable, AI powered push notification platform for product and engineering teams. Projector delivered the right message to the right user at the right time using deep user modeling and personalization, built on Apache Kafka and Apache Beam, scaling to support extreme and unpredictable notification workloads from user-generated content. ### Seesaw Co-Founder / CEO (2012-10-01 – 2013-12-01) Seesaw was a consumer product designed to improve the way we make decisions with help from our friends. In addition to front-of-house responsibility, I also functioned as CTO and implemented a large portion of our back-end infrastructure. Seesaw was an amazing learning experience — the consumer mobile app space is unbelievably fickle, and no combination of amazing investors, great App Store promotion, and top-shelf execution guarantees any amount of success. I'm proud of the work that we did, but it ultimately failed to gain traction and we sold our assets to Byliner in 2013. ### CoTweet Co-Founder / Chief Architect (2008-04-01 – 2011-08-01) Co-founded CoTweet, one of the first enterprise social media management tools. We built the platform that companies like Ford, Microsoft, and JetBlue used to adapt to the new world of public customer service — making it easy for call center staff to engage customers on Twitter at scale. I developed the core product thesis, built the team, and led engineering, including early work on tweet attribution, delegation, and CRM integrations. Acquired by ExactTarget in 2010, which later became a foundational piece of Salesforce's Marketing Cloud.