GETTING TO KNOW GROVARA: Q&A With Software Engineer Hayden Rothman
When recent Boston University computer science graduate Hayden Rothman was working at an investment firm that was acquired by a much larger firm, he found the day-to-day work to be not as impactful as he would have liked.
But he liked his teammates. One of them, Matthew Robinson took a job for a tech company headquartered in Philadelphia, and introduced Rothman to the CEO. The two instantly hit it off and Rothman was sold on joining Robinson, a Tech Advisor, at Grovara.
Since joining the team in March, Rothman, a native New Yorker, has hit the ground running from his home office in Boston and the software engineer plays a key role in maintaining and upgrading Grovara’s technology. He sat with us for a Q&A:
What specifically do you consider your specialty or expertise?
Historically I gravitate toward backend roles, typically database and cloud infrastructure – what you don’t see behind the scenes. I’ve mostly worked full-stack roles. But one of my passions is cloud infrastructure. I feel as if cloud providers have massively changed the industry in such a way that anyone can build their own software or website, deploy it natively in the cloud, and automatically scale it up to be on par with industry giants. One of our big long-term goals at Grovara is to transition to a more scalable cloud architecture.
My secondary passion is AI. Our biggest priority is improving the user experience by automating more workflows and removing the pain points buyers and sellers have long experienced in B2B wholesale.
“What really makes me want to stay at Grovara is the team is so amazing. Everybody works so hard and we all share this common goal of improving the platform and the business.” – Hayden Rothman
What was one of the challenges you faced joining Grovara?
One of the biggest hurdles I first had to overcome was the language of Consumer Package Goods (CPG). There are a lot of acronyms, referencing documents, and legal and compliance language that was mostly foreign to me. The most valuable thing to me was I felt comfortable to talk to any of our team members about something I didn’t understand.
Because I’m new and learning, anytime there’s something I can’t figure out I think ‘Is this too complicated? Is there a way to make it less complicated through our platform?’ That’s the beauty of someone with my background can bring, adding new eyes on something.
What are some of the highlights of Grovara’s technology from your view?
The G-Chat and specifically “Audit Trail” feature on the Orders Pages stands out. It’s one of our most recent enhancements and allows users to have much better visibility at any given point in a transaction. We’ve been going through some cycles to refine it as much as we can and we’ve been getting great user feedback. We also have added the ability to “star” messages that can be referenced in the future.
What are some of your other priorities?
We have plans to enhance our Pallet Builder and are working to offer more convenient sampling orders. We are also working on an integration with our payment processor Stripe to set up brand subscriptions.
In what ways do you see Grovara disrupting global trade?
Our SAAS Services specifically the broker-dealer model we are architecting is really disruptive. We know there is software that does something similar but from what we’ve seen, many companies will use their own internal software. Many might use Shopify but have to integrate. For smaller brands it’s very fragmented. So our broker model really helps these smaller brands gain some velocity.
What has you excited about the future at Grovara?
Our goal is to bridge the gap between the B2C and B2B experience, to make everything faster while improving security. The goal is to completely cut out the middleman and to make the experience as comfortable as possible for our users. It doesn’t need to be complicated. Our users demand something simple and fast.