After graduating from Washington State University in 2019, Kenneth Eversole went to work for aerospace and defense giant Boeing. He says he soon discovered he wanted a change of pace, drawn to the idea of working for a startup, specifically in his hometown.
“You start a company with five people in Seattle — cool, great job, move on, we’ve got 150 more of you. You do that in St. Louis, you’re employing five engineers. That could change a street. That could change a neighborhood. It’s more tangible,” Eversole said.
In 2020, Eversole joined St. Louis-based call center software startup Balto when it had fewer than 20 employees. During his two-year tenure there, he helped advance the company’s products as it grew to more than 100 employees. Today, Eversole is a systems reliability engineer at San Francisco-based technology company Cloudflare (NYSE: NET). He remains based in St. Louis.
Outside of his day job, Eversole has sought to boost St. Louis’ technology and startup ecosystem, having served as a teaching fellow for software development nonprofit LaunchCode and as a judge for Arch Grants.
Did you always envision working in the technology field? No, I did not always envision myself in the technology field. But from a very young age, with the help of Legos, computers and video games, I was able to learn my passion for it.
What’s your proudest accomplishment? My proudest accomplishment to date was moving from my hometown of Alton to Washington state for my undergraduate studies. When I look back on it, it was a massive risk both socially and financially. When moving 1,500 miles away, knowing no one and not having college fully paid for was a daunting experience. That risk is completely outweighed by the reward I received though. I was the first of my family to graduate college, I made amazing lifelong friendships, and I learned from industry greats. I would not trade that decision for anything.
Where do you see yourself and your career in five years? I am not following a timeline or a plan set forth by anyone else, I am just following my passions. I hope to have a career full of amazing ideas, friends and challenges that all culminate to the betterment of my community.
What can St. Louis do to engage more young tech workers like yourself? We must start by including technology-minded people further into project planning, community gathering, and equitability distributing conversations in both the public and private sectors within our community. I believe this will encourage young tech workers to engage with the community and help facilitate innovative and creative ideas to help better St. Louis as a holistic community.
Who are your biggest mentors? I have had many mentors for many different reasons in my life. To name the ones who have helped me professionally, there would be too many to mention here. Personally, the one that is worth mentioning is my mom, from whom I have learned resilience, without which I would be nothing.
You’ve worked with nonprofits like Arch Grants and LaunchCode. Why is that important to you? In my experience, St. Louis — in a very good, but unfortunate way — is the opposite of Silicon Valley. Everyone there is a software engineer and in tech. St. Louis has a lot of hungry people that have amazing ideas, but I think there’s a huge lack of senior level tech people or have a window into those larger tech companies. To me, that’s why I help with that. With Arch Grants, I like to see what startups are doing and how they could be helped. For LaunchCode, I see this area in lack of growth in the technical community. It was my way to give back in that regard.
