About

Engineer, Leader, Explorer, Musician, Son

Engineer

I love to build. I grew up in Switzerland, building toys, soapbox cars, machines, electronics. I spent afternoons after school at the local electronics store, learning to program my first computer, a Commodore 64, which eventually led me to earn a Master in Computer Science from EPFL in 1994.

In 1996, I moved to Mountain View in California to work for Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI): dream job, dream company, dream location. As part of OS team, I built internationalization and security features of Irix, both in kernel and user space.

In 1999, I joined iCopyright in Seattle, a startup looking to sell licenses to copyrighted content online. I loved the startup vibe and did everything from writing web and backend frameworks, wiring up our offices with ethernet, building and racking hardware.

In 2004, I joined Speakeasy, the local ISP popular with technical users, as their Software Architect. We extended our offerings to business users, integrated VoIP services, and built a consumer voice service.

In 2013, I joined Ookla, the makers of Speedtest, and lead the engineering team in building out Speedtest, turning a Flash website into a consumer web and mobile applications, multiple enterprise SaaS products, APIs, SDKs, and embedded network testing solutions, serving 80M+ MAU.

I have recently built a CLI to interact with the amazing Workflowy application.

Follow me on logo github.com/mholzen.

Leader

Whenever I join a group of people and I am invested in the success of the mission, I find myself organizing the effort to be as efficient as possible, while maintaining cohesion and respect for each other. If we can have fun doing it, even better.

When a team is running smoothly, picking up tasks from each other, discussing different approaches, cheering each other on, it truly is one of the best feelings. I marvel at what a group of people can accomplish when a vision is well communicated, the team well resourced and the mission worthwhile.

At Ookla, my team was composed of about 100 engineers, between 4 different major products.

You can read my opinions about ownership in BuiltinSeattle.com.

Explorer

I love to explore nature, hike, backpack, camp, and take photos.

I particulary enjoy the challenge of getting myself to a remote location, using only my body strength, and carrying everything I need to live, ideally comfortably for a few days. It teaches me about organization, needs, risk management, friendship.

Nature has a calming, focusing and grounding effect on me. I find a connection to my environment essential to understand where we come from, and what matters.

Musician

I love music, I play drums, and I DJ from time to time.

Son

I grew up in Switzerland, the son of Marion and Ernst von Holzen, moved to the United States when I was 25, currently living in Ballard, Seattle.

Find Me Elsewhere