For the first eighteen months, Konde was a one-person company. That was deliberate — small enough to keep the architecture coherent, small enough to ship a release a day, small enough that nobody had a meeting on the calendar. With v1.0 out the door and seed capital in the bank, that constraint stopped serving us.
Q1 was our first hiring quarter. Three people joined the founding team. Here is who they are and what they are owning.
Sersan Parto — Lead Engineer
Parto is taking the lead on the core Studio engine. Before Konde, he spent six years at a Singapore fintech building the same kind of orchestration layer — many small services, deployed continuously, observed across noisy infra — and the muscle memory shows.
His first month at Konde, he refactored our build pipeline so a Studio release goes from git push to signed-and-stapled-on-the-CDN in under nine minutes. The previous record was thirty-seven. The kind of thing you only get from someone who has watched a thousand bad CI logs and knows where the wasted minutes hide.
What Parto owns: Studio core (Projects, Agents, KSS), the build/release pipeline, and the long-running production services we host ourselves.
Corporal Yoona — Engineering, Frontend & Theming
Yoona joined us out of Telkom University in Bandung. Final-year student, but the portfolio she submitted (a personal Kanban built on Tauri with custom theming, an open-source Raycast extension for transit lookups) made it clear she had been operating two levels above her schooling for a while.
Her first project was the rewrite of our theme system. The fifty-six themes that ship with Studio? Hers. The render pipeline that pulls a theme spec from JSON and resolves it to CSS variables across every Konde surface — Studio, Caster, KW Render, Konde Docs — also hers. The fact that picking seafoam in Studio paints this blog the same shade is her work.
What Yoona owns: frontend across all Konde surfaces, the theme system (KDF), and the in-app onboarding rewrite landing in v1.2.
Bambang — Operations & Community
Bambang is our first non-engineering hire. He is taking on the things that fall through the cracks of a fully-engineering team: customer support, the closed-beta program, social presence, and the commercial side of partnerships.
If you have emailed support@konde.io in the last month, you have already met him. If you are in the closed beta, the weekly digest in your inbox is his work. He came from running operations at a Surabaya-based agency, which means he is comfortable juggling fifty things at once and unflustered by the kind of low-glamour, high-leverage work the rest of us are bad at.
What Bambang owns: support, beta program, social, commercial partnerships.
Lessons from filling three seats
A few things we took away from Q1 hiring that might be useful to other founders running their first hiring quarter.
Look for the second-derivative skill. Parto's killer trait was not his Go résumé; it was that he had clearly thought hard about why CI pipelines were slow at his last shop. Yoona's was not the polished portfolio; it was that she had picked the unfashionable problems (transit timetables, custom theming) and solved them. Hire for the meta-skill, not the surface-level keywords.
Hire one role at a time. We tried to run two searches in parallel for the first month and our quality dropped on both. As soon as we focused on Parto, then Yoona, then Bambang sequentially, the signal got crisper. Cohort hiring is for later-stage companies.
The first non-engineering hire is the highest-leverage one. Bambang took roughly thirty hours a week of low-context work off the engineering team's plate. The maths on that is not subtle.
What this means for the product
Three people more, same release cadence, more surface coverage. Q1 fixes are landing on schedule. Konde Hosting (Q2) is now a real engineering plan, not a roadmap aspiration.
Welcome to the team, Parto, Yoona, and Bambang. Q2 is going to be wild.