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95 lines
7.2 KiB
Plaintext
---
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title: Nick Puljic
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description: Essential brief on Nick Puljic, co-founder and CTO of Hanover Park. Identity, career, what he built, and how he is likely to grade.
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sidebar:
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icon: user
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---
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Two-time fintech founder, low public surface area, personally built a double-entry general ledger. Treat him as a peer who happens to be interviewing you, not as a gatekeeper.
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## Identity
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| --- | --- |
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| Full name | Nicholas "Nick" Puljic |
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| Role | Co-founder and CTO, Hanover Park (Feb 2024 to present), NYC |
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| Education | Columbia University, BS Computer Science, 2015 to 2019 |
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| LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-puljic (~2.4k followers) |
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| GitHub | github.com/NickPuljic: account since 2016, zero public repos, zero gists, no bio |
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| Press | Forbes 30 Under 30 with Chris Hladczuk |
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:::danger[Do not reference open-source work]
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He has a GitHub with nothing on it. Dave's guess ("I don't even imagine he has a GitHub") was right in substance. No blog, no podcast appearances, no talks found. Chris is the public voice; Chris's June 2026 post says it took a film crew showing up at the office to get Nick on camera. Flatter the work, not the personal brand.
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:::
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## Career
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<Steps>
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<Step title="Amazon, SWE (intern per Dave; SWE per LinkedIn snapshots)">
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Big-company baseline. Dave described it as an internship.
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</Step>
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<Step title="Oscar Health, engineer during hypergrowth">
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Regulated healthcare at scale. Likely where he met Jake Ruth, his future co-founder.
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</Step>
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<Step title="Stock Unlock, co-founder and CTO (June 2021 to June 2023), YC W22">
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His 0 to 1. Retail-investor education and equity analysis web app. Co-founders Jake Ruth (CEO, ex-Oscar senior SWE) and Daniel Pronk (CFO, finance YouTuber, ~192k subs, brought the Discord audience). Raised ~1.3M seed including 500k from YC. Priced 6.99/month or 74.99/year, 7-day trial, no credit card. Launched 2021-12-11 after a four-month ~200-user beta from Pronk's Discord. Originally "Stonk Reporter." Stack, from Jake's HN launch thread: fully serverless AWS, Cognito auth, API Gateway plus Lambda (Python), DynamoDB plus Postgres, S3/CloudFront/Route 53, Finnhub market data. Nick exited June 2023; the company continues under Jake with iOS/Android apps and 170k+ tickers. He is no longer listed among YC's active founders for it.
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</Step>
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<Step title="Hanover Park, co-founder and CTO (Feb 2024 to present)">
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See below.
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</Step>
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</Steps>
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Aggregators also list Remedy Partners and Nannytucket earlier; unverified, do not cite.
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## What he built at Hanover Park
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His stated thesis: fund administration was "ripe for the future of Services as a Software." Per Emergence: "Co-founders Chris Hladczuk and Nick Puljic built the general ledger, the waterfall engine, the investor portal, and the portfolio management layer from scratch... you're designing the plumbing around intelligence."
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- Traction: 1B to 15B AUA in under 12 months; 25B+ per the May JD; 30B+ per the careers page. 27M Series A led by Emergence with Lux and Susa; 31M total raised. Angels are fund CFOs at Bain Capital, Clearlake, CD&R, Hellman and Friedman.
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- Shipped notables: first MCP server in the space (fund data queried from Claude or ChatGPT), zero-fee automated payments, Ramp and Brex expense sync, the Asylum Ventures migration (30+ entities and a decade of history in ~100 hours).
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- Positioning line: "Stripe for payments. Ramp for expenses. Hanover Park for investments."
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### Stack for the role
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| Layer | Choice | Source |
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| --- | --- | --- |
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| Frontend and API | TypeScript, Next.js on Vercel, tRPC between browser and app | JD, John |
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| Database and auth | Supabase / Postgres | JD, John |
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| Background jobs and AI inference | Trigger.dev (wrapper over EC2) | JD, John |
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| Long-running agent jobs | Vercel Sandbox via the Vercel Harness Agent (wraps Claude Code / Codex / Anthropic, normalizes messages for storage and chat display) | John |
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| Serverless backend (earlier posting) | SST on AWS | MTS JD |
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| Experiments | Eve (John likes the DX), jcode | John |
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| AI budget | Effectively unlimited; ~800/month company card plus more on request | John |
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### Culture, per the JD
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"Engineering-first." "No bureaucracy. No hierarchy." No QA team, no PM writing specs, no design handoff. You ship it, you own it, and make "architecture and technical decisions alongside the CTO." Required: strong full-stack fundamentals, production LLM/AI workflow experience, high ownership. Values: Egoless Execution, Maniacal Urgency, Own the Details. The Design Engineer hire "will work directly with Nick."
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## How he will grade
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<Accordion>
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<AccordionItem title="Serverless and managed-infra pragmatist, twice over" defaultOpen>
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Stock Unlock was Lambda plus Dynamo plus Cognito. Hanover Park is Supabase plus SST/Trigger.dev on AWS. Hand-rolled Kubernetes, Kafka, or custom orchestration will read as ceremony. Pick boring managed primitives, defend them on shipping speed and operational headcount, then name the point where you would outgrow them.
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</AccordionItem>
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<AccordionItem title="He personally built a double-entry ledger">
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Correctness primitives are home turf and transfer to almost any "rebuild X" prompt: immutable append-only journal, derived read models, idempotency keys on ingestion, exactly-once effects on money movement, reconciliation loops, full audit trail, replay and backfill for corrections. "We never mutate history, we post a reversing entry" is his own system reflected back.
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</AccordionItem>
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<AccordionItem title="Full-stack means the front end is graded">
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Stock Unlock was a dense consumer data-viz web app; Hanover Park hired a design engineer for "interaction patterns for workflows where humans and AI agents work side by side." Design the review surface: how a human sees agent output, its confidence, the diff, and corrects it. Dense tables, optimistic UI, perceived latency, empty and error states.
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</AccordionItem>
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<AccordionItem title="AI is expected; human-in-the-loop is the differentiator">
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Extraction from unstructured input, model proposes, human approves, system commits. Confidence thresholds routing to review queues. Evals on real edge cases. Cost and latency per document. This is his product thesis and the cheapest route to the "creativity, not generic" bar.
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</AccordionItem>
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<AccordionItem title="Two-time founder, tiny team, no PM">
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Trade-off narration is the signal: what you cut in v1, what you would only build at 10x, what you buy instead of build, what ships in a week versus a quarter. Ship then iterate is house doctrine, paired with Own the Details on anything touching money.
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</AccordionItem>
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</Accordion>
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## Temperament, per Dave
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Passionate, deeply technical, gets animated when the problem is interesting. Engage him, do not lecture. He appreciates good questions and dislikes softballs. A correct-but-generic answer from someone with my background reads as underperformance ("with his background, I expected a lot more").
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## Sources and caveats
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Compiled 2026-09-03 from LinkedIn search-index snapshots (the profile itself returns HTTP 999), YC, the Ashby job board, the GitHub API, Emergence Capital, Euclid/Verticalist, and press. Employment history and Columbia CS corroborated across three independent sources. Dave's prep-call account (2026-09-03) and John's screen (2026-09-02) supply the stack and temperament details.
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