One Year of Software at Alpaca -- Happy Anniversary Maci!
When you're a non-technical founder, you need a unique partner as your first software hire. Alpaca found her.
July 1, 2025
Dear Alpaca Team,
It’s a special day when you get to celebrate two team anniversaries in one day! Today, I am so grateful to get to celebrate Maci McWilliams’ one year anniversary at Alpaca!
When we started this company, I did not think we would ever hire a software engineer.
It’s hard to believe that now, when so much of our business is moving in the direction of Alpaca Pulse because we’re seeing the power of listening to teachers’ input with simple tools and delivering actionable data back to leaders.
Last year, one of our investors said “I think you need to meet someone. She is a software engineer, with a true entrepreneur’s mindset. And she wants to work for a company who’s making a difference.”
I met Maci McWilliams at her campus Starbucks in the Raikes School at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, and I knew almost immediately that we needed to work together.
Maci is a truly unique talent, blessed with a combination of intellectual curiosity, work ethic, and creativity that is rare. Maci is steadfast in her commitment to bring teacher input into every aspect of Alpaca Pulse. Last week, she convinced a couple of teachers she met on an airplane to let her sit between them so she could test our survey with them. (True story!)
Maci also holds our team’s quirkiest weekend stories, regularly reporting back on her side-by-side cost analysis of items at CostCo, discussing top protein choices for a day of skiing, impressing us with the extravagant meals she spends her weekends creating, or babysitting and reviving our sourdough starters while we’re on vacation. (Thanks again!)
What has been the biggest impact on our company, and on me personally, is Maci’s extraordinary ability to build a product with the input and insights from non-technical stakeholders.
I’m a non-technical founder of what is now emerging to be a software company. That has its beneficial moments, but brings big challenges and most certainly affects my confidence from time to time. But instead of throwing up her hands and assuming I won’t understand the opportunities or blockers we have in a build or the trade-offs we need to make, Maci finds a different way for us to build together.
Maci and I have built dashboards on post-it notes, whiteboards, and grid paper; with pens and markers and watercolor. We meet in the middle on Notion and spreadsheets, and she seamlessly turns the work into software — and FAST. Maci coached our Educator team through an analysis of our data that allowed them to see the connections between our teacher sentiments, while she simultaneously built the model out in the software.
Instead of feeling less confident for my lack of technical abilities as a leader, Maci makes sure everyone — whether it’s our educator team, her CEO, a teacher at Camp Alpaca, or just some educators she meets on a plane — knows that their input and perspective matters deeply to the product we’re building. That’s wisdom beyond her years, and it’s creating a more thoughtful product that teachers truly love.
The year ahead is going to be a big one for Alpaca Pulse — and we’re ready for it, thanks to Maci. Congratulations on your first year, Maci — let’s keep building, together!
KB
Congrats, Maci! I am so curious to hear more about that in-flight test session.