David Byttow

David Byttow is an American software engineer and entrepreneur. He is the head of engineering at Sorare in Paris, France. He is also the founder of Bold and Secret and has worked as a software engineer in various positions for twenty years.

A Day in the Life of a Principal Software Engineer 2021 edition

David Byttow started college at Purdue University in 2000 to study computer science. After a year, he dropped out to join Double Helix Games, a gaming company in California. In 2007, he left for a year-long contract at Namco / Bandai Games before joining Google as an engineer, where he worked on various products such as Google+ Profiles and Pages, Google +1, and Google Wave. After four years with Google, Byttow joined Square as its director of engineering. A year later, he left to start Secret.

David Byttow cofounded Secret in 2013 with Chrys Bader, initially raising $1.2 million in seed funding. Secret was an anonymous social network application that reached 15 million users globally within six months of launch and was valued at over $120 million. Byttow was CEO and the primary architect of the back-end stack that scaled exponentially across the world. In April 2015, Secret announced it was shutting down.

In 2015, David Byttow cofounded Bold with Ben South Lee, also from Secret. Bold was a SaaS blog publishing tool for enterprises. In 2017, Postmates hired Byttow and acquired Bold, subsequently shutting it down. Byttow became the VP of engineering and product for Postmates’ customer-facing app and stayed with the company until September 2018, when he left to join Snap, the company behind Snapchat. After his time at Snap, Byttow was an engineer with Bridgewater Associates and Lyft before joining Sorare.