Shared chapter
Amos Elliston
Former CTO, Geni and Flexport · Technology executive
Relationship
How we worked together
Amos replaced Alan Braverman as Geni's CTO after Yammer spun out of Geni. He is one of the most brilliant engineers and engineering leaders I have worked with. After Geni, he went on to serve as CTO of Flexport and continued his career as a technology executive.
Influence
What I learned
Amos combined deep algorithmic thinking with pragmatic engineering leadership. When I later needed to reproduce Geni's family-tree layout for a mobile application, I ultimately used the API he had designed—a reminder that the best abstraction is often the one that makes an extraordinarily difficult problem reusable.
Projects
Projects we built together
Geni.com / Yammer / MyHeritage · 2007 – 2013
Geni — one shared family tree for humanity
Amos figured out the extraordinarily complex layout mechanism that allowed Geni to render a global genealogy graph containing millions of people, one family at a time. When I later needed the same capability for a mobile application, reproducing the algorithm proved so difficult that I used his API instead. His work turned a nearly intractable graph-visualization problem into reliable platform infrastructure.
Read the case studyThemes
The work we shared
Elsewhere