Derrick Ko
Co-Founder at Stealth AI Startup
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDerrick Ko is a serial founder and product-focused technology leader with 14 years of experience building and scaling consumer-facing startups from engineering to exit. As CEO and co-founder of Spin (the first shared micromobility company in the US) he grew a service used by millions and led the team through acquisition by Ford, and now leads Matchday. He blends hands-on engineering roots—from early SDE and founding engineer roles at startups and Microsoft—to product growth leadership at Lyft, giving him a rare mix of technical depth and go-to-market experience. Derrick contributes to open source front-end tooling (notably improvements and RFC-compliant tests for the mailcheck plugin), reflecting attention to reliability and edge cases. Based in San Francisco with a BS in Computer Engineering from Purdue, he invests in and advises companies that sit at the intersection of product, hardware, and delightful user experiences. Notably, he has repeatedly turned early technical bets into scalable, exit-ready businesses.
14 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Engineering, BS, Computer Engineering at Purdue University
Github Skills (6)
unit-testing10
javascript10
jquery10
email-validation10
css4
html4
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
mailcheck/mailcheck
Mar 2012 - Dec 2016
Reduce misspelled email addresses in your web apps.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 52 commits, 20 PRs in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Derrick primarily contributed to the development of the Mailcheck jQuery plugin, adding a minified version and refactoring its method signature. They implemented features like case-insensitive comparison and input escaping, while also updating the README file to reflect these changes. Furthermore, the user added comprehensive unit tests and expanded test cases to cover additional edge cases and RFC compliant email addresses, ensuring high reliability and functionality of the project.
e-mail
mailcheck/mailcheck-objectivec
Apr 2014 - Jul 2016
Reduce misspelled email addresses in your iOS app.
Contributions:5 commits, 1 PR, 2 pushes in 2 years 3 months
e-mailios
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