Throughout his career, Allen Chaves, the current Chief Technology Officer at Klaviyo, has focused his efforts on facilitating technology transformations for organizations. His ability to help companies make successful transitions in their technology sector can be traced back to his time working for Intuit, a company that had been in business since 1999 when he started in 2006.
When Chaves joined the team at Intuit, the company was going through a pivotal time of transition. It was changing from a desktop company to a SaaS business. A major part of this transition required changing the company’s technology accordingly, and Chaves found success in his position by being the one to make that change happen.
“We had to ask ourselves,” says Chaves, “how do we want to serve customers online? How do we deal with the cultural changes that happen between being a desktop company and an online company? How do you scale a successful online product? And how do you make your services more effective?”
He continues, “We went through the traditional services journey, moved to the public cloud, the separation of the front end from the back end, and I spent most of my time on those projects.” His success in this endeavor came to define his time at Intuit.
From there, Chaves went on to work at a company in Boston called Endurance, which no longer exists by the same name. This organization offered services in the web hosting space as a competitor to GoDaddy.
Endurance was working together with numerous other companies to expand their brand and facilitate acquisitions. As the company grew, Chaves focused on meeting the organization’s business goals while evolving its technology “to be less wasteful.”
Chaves recounts, “It was the same theme that I experienced at Intuit — how do I make this service-oriented? How do I resource teams to do that?”
It was during this period of Chaves’s career that he learned a lot about the best practices of team development and hiring. “The theme to me is, how do you hire the right people and foster a culture of independence, team collaboration, etc.,” he says.
After spending three years working and learning at Endurance, Chaves joined the team at Klaviyo — the first private company he’s worked for during his career.
“I always worked for big public companies; it was intentional. When people ask why I joined Klaviyo, I say I was very thoughtful before I joined and the reasons why I joined the company suit me to this day. What I found at Klaviyo was a lot of talent and more importantly, really good people,” Chaves explains.
“The second reason I joined Klaviyo is the company’s huge calling and mission direction. From the outside, it’s easy to say we are a marketing company for eCommerce, but internally […], we are in the business of solving problems that occur when you have companies communicating with their customers,” Chaves tells us. “It just so happened that marketing for eCommerce was the first use case that we saw and we solved.”
When asked about the pillars of Klaviyo’s organization and workplace environment, Chaves says, “We truly believe in practice that you are better if you’re making your team better. Sometimes I get this question when I’m interviewing people — ‘What would it take to be a star engineer on your team?’ And my answer is always if you want to get the gold star, I will say that you deserve that when the team that you’re in is better because you’re in that team.”
He adds, “Of course, you have to have all the skills, you have to have the interpersonal relationship ability. But what you need to do is make the team better by the fact that you were there.”
This teamwork mindset defines the value of collaboration at Klaviyo and goes back to the primary reasons Chaves decided to join the organization. He goes on to talk about the learning opportunities the company offers to its employees, emphasizing the vital importance of ongoing education for all team members.
“And when we’re hiring, we’re specifically looking for people who are active learners,” he says. “We’re gonna give people the means to learn, be it an unlimited budget for books — every employee at Klaviyo can buy any books they want, doesn’t need to be technical books — or whatever is going to make you better. We’re going to give engineers the ability to go to conferences of their choice — this is a deeply personal thing that people need to be passionate about and be able to learn.”
Chaves believes that the emphasis on learning for all of Klaviyo’s team members is largely related to the company’s focus on technology. “Why do we think that learning and passion are important? Technology. It changes so much and so rapidly that if you don’t continue to learn and bring that back into work, you are not going to succeed,” he says.
While Chaves has already found great success during his time at Klaviyo, he’s continually looking forward to new opportunities and experiences within the organization. The company is currently focusing on becoming a “multi-product company,” with the intention of offering SMS services and other options to expand on its current email marketing services.
Chaves’s excitement about the future of the company is clear. “We have huge opportunities both in the U.S. and globally with many major eCommerce vendors, beyond Shopify. We have such a huge opportunity in Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. Right now I’m focusing on how to tackle these opportunities.”
With his many years of experience in the industry and his expertise in leading organizations and teams through chapters of transformation, Chaves is a valuable source of knowledge and ideas. What advice does he have for other individuals who want to seek a similar career path or sell a similar service?
“When you’re right out of college, find a company that has amazing people,” he says.
“Find an organization that gives you an opportunity to do great projects. You are in a phase of your career where you are literally learning as you go, you’re learning about the technology, you’re learning about the business, and you’re learning how to interact with other people.”
He continues, “When people ask me about career advice, I tell them I never had a plan to become a VP or a CTO — never. … What I thought was, how am I going to have the biggest impact … and help the company in the team that I’m with? Because just having that just takes you places, you’re just everybody’s supporter, when you’re helping them. Just focusing on helping a company succeed can take you far.”
By living his own advice and “focusing on helping,” Allen Chaves has found great success in his personal career and brought valuable growth to the companies and organizations he has poured his time and efforts into.
Today, Chaves wants to continue his pattern of growth with Klaviyo. He hopes to successfully express the company’s passion for hiring great people, investing in its own employees, and offering opportunities to grow and transition in order to keep up with all of the ongoing changes in business and technology.
