On the TechTO stage ×1
First seen on the TechTO stage in 2021. Every talk is searchable — ask the archive about Jonathan ↗
Also on the stage ×1
Panels and roundups Jonathan appeared on.
In their words
When you're 11 people everyone knows everything. When you're 600, basically nobody knows anything.
As a leader it's easy to think that the message you're trying to deliver is being percolated through the organization, and that's almost always not true. You have to say it three, four, five, six times, until people are sick of hearing it.
I joined in January, and I looked at 20-plus companies before I landed here. A mission that I aligned with, a great culture, and great people — you spend most of your waking hours at work.
Make hay while the sun shines. The market today is really good for companies to raise capital, and there's a lot of macro uncertainty, so we felt it was a great time to fill up the war chest.
I talk a lot about building the best team in fintech. For me that means having a really high talent density, so even though we are growing the team a lot in absolute terms, I care a lot about keeping the bar really high.
Quick answers
What does Jonathan Klein do at KOHO?
He is chief technology officer and chief operating officer, having joined the Toronto fintech as CTO in January 2021. He came from Wayfair, where he spent four years as a director of engineering and led a team that grew from 11 people to a peak above 600.
How does he stay technical while managing at scale?
He told TechTO he blocks calendar time for technical work that is not writing production code — reading about AWS services, looking at test configurations, building PCs — and that at Wayfair he stayed close to the system by joining incident war rooms and asking every candidate the hard problems his team was facing.
What stage of company does he look for?
Series B through D — the scale-up phase. He told TechTO he ran the search on a Trello board with explicit criteria, wanting a company with money in the bank and growth ahead, but still early enough that one person can have a large effect.