Ameir Abdeldayem, a University of Maryland alum and systems administrator for AOL, never set out to be part of a startup as a side project. Let alone a dating app. But Abdeldayem, who serves as CTO at Willow, has ended up playing a vital role in the growth of the dating app, which was founded by D.C. native and former sponsored skater Michael Bruch.
Founded just this year, Abdeldayem was brought on from day one to help guide the tech startup during its development. Bruch told DC Inno that he started Willow because “conversation, and by extension, empathy and the ability to genuinely relate and talk with others, isn't exactly prevalent in modern social media.”
Willow was created, according to Bruch, to help fill this void. The messaging-heavy app focuses primarily on the conversations between users while adding a layer of privacy and anonymity to it.
Willow is part dating app, part social media network. But rather than emphasizing profile pictures and personal galleries, it chooses to highlight message-based connections. Abdeldayem said that “by starting conversations first, Willow opens up the opportunity for long-standing connections to be made without a person's looks being the primary factor.”
So, how did an electrical engineer from UMd come to meet a local sponsored skateboarder and eventually build a dating application?
Abdeldayem says that his brother, a long-time friend and skate partner of Michael, first introduced the two.
“My brothers tend to pitch random ideas to me, but when I heard the idea for Willow, I was intrigued. My brother connected me with Michael, and everything flowed from there,” Abdeldayem told DC Inno. He joked, “I was surprised to know that he was a skater *and* incredibly smart.”
For Bruch, starting, leading and building a startup has been “a serious learning experience.”
“It’s had its up and downs and frankly, there's been a lot of stress, but in less than a year, I've learned more about running a business than I would have in a decade working at a large company. A huge part of this has been the team I've surrounded myself with. I feel like everyone I work with is smarter than me … It constantly pushes me to do better,” Bruch told DC Inno.
"If the startup lifestyle is wearing skinny jeans and riding scooters around, that's not me."
Abdeldayem graduated from UMd in 2009 with a degree in electrical engineering. "I'd be lying if I said I'd never thought of switching to an easier major, but I'm very happy I hung in there," he said.
"I strongly believe that my time at UMD prepared me for the real world by instilling me with a very well-rounded education," he said, along with several career-focused programs on campus that "gave me an idea of what to expect and how to plan for the future."
Since graduation, the majority of his experience had involved large, government-focused enterprises. Abdeldayem previously worked as a consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton and was a systems administrator for Hargrove. He has worked at AOL since October 2012.
While getting involved with an early-stage tech company wasn’t part of the plan, being a startup CTO has provided a “contrasting” experience, he says.
The beginning of Abdeldayem's startup journey came shortly after he first met Bruch.
Over the course of several weeks, the two met up frequently to discuss hypothetical features and how they would want to implement them in their own dream application. Before long, those ideas materialized, some of the features were designed and Willow became a reality.
“When I describe it to friends and family, I tend to explain it in such a simple way that it doesn't really capture what I do, but if I try to accurately explain it, I get blank stares. My job is very much what is called 'DevOps' nowadays. That’s the gist of it, although there's tons more to it,” Abdeldayem said. “If the startup lifestyle is wearing skinny jeans and riding scooters around, that's not me, but I do participate in hacking all night at times.”
Avdeldayem said that he largely credits his current career path to his childhood of tinkering with electronics and the passion he developed for the Linux operating system later in high school. “That's where I learned about Ohm's Law, resistivity, and the like, and envisioned I'd be working in technology at some point.”
All images courtesy of Willow.
