Inside STACK: From the desk of Ariel Alonso, VP of Engineering
I’ve spent years building STACK. Long enough to have shaped much of what this product is today, and long enough to have arrived at a few realizations that I think are worth sharing.
There’s something about the way we build software here that I’ve come to believe is genuinely rare. It has less to do with the technology itself than you might expect. It’s about the people, the choices we’ve made along the way, and a culture that has only gotten stronger as we’ve grown. I wanted to pull back the curtain on that a little. Because what’s behind this product is just as important as what’s in it.
Over the years, we’ve gotten disciplined about starting with why. When you’re deep in the work and the list of opportunities gets bigger, it’s easy to jump straight to solutions. Understanding why something matters before we touch it is what keeps the platform intentional.
We care about this product exactly the way you’d want the team building it to care. For us, that starts with never losing sight of the reason behind what we’re building.
One of the things that genuinely surprised me over time is how much continuity matters. This team wasn’t assembled last quarter.
We’ve been building this together for years. And at some point, I realized that the product wasn’t just getting better because we were shipping more. It was getting better because the people building it knew each other, trusted each other, and had developed a shared instinct for what’s right.
That kind of thing isn’t something you can manufacture.
It builds slowly, through every scaling challenge, every new problem that growth puts in front of you. Then one day you look around and realize it’s become your greatest advantage.
I used to think culture was one of those buzzwords people threw around because it sounded good. But after enough years of doing this, I’ve realized it’s probably the most under-appreciated factor in whether a product is great or just good enough. The culture at STACK isn’t something we put on a slide. It’s the natural result of people who are passionate about what they do, who they do it with, and who they do it for.
Culture isn’t a side effect of how we work. It’s the feature.
We’ve never accepted the idea that you have to choose between moving fast and being thoughtful.
We want to be better, not just faster. Those aren’t the same thing. We’re deliberate about the decisions that shape the platform long-term. We make trade-offs every day. That’s the reality of building software. But there’s a difference between a trade-off and a shortcut. Trade-offs are responsible. Shortcuts are debt. We know the difference.
All that intentionality, continuity, culture? It’s easy to have when you’re small. A handful of people in a room who all believe in the same thing. That’s not hard. What’s hard is holding onto it as you grow. As the customers get bigger, the stakes get higher, and the complexity multiplies. We’ve done that. And the fact that we’ve gotten faster, sharper, and more disciplined while scaling? That’s not luck. That’s the result of everything I’ve been talking about. The people. The approach. The years of building together.
We’re built for this.
And when you invest in STACK, you’re not just investing in a platform. You’re investing in the team behind it. Real people, real engineers, deeply connected to every part of what you use. We do our thing so you can do yours.
At our core, we share something fundamental with our customers. We’re builders. Different tools, different materials, but the same mission.
At STACK, we build the platform you depend on to help build our world.
Let’s build it together.
Ariel Alonso
STACK VP of Engineering
Ariel is a Technology Leader at STACK, focused on platform architecture, reliability at scale, and building strong engineering teams and culture. He’s spent 25+ years building enterprise software across fintech, retail, and SaaS, and the last eight years helping build STACK.
