In this episode of the Next Matters Most podcast, Overson discusses his wide-ranging experiences in the tech world and his new company, Vino Technologies, Inc.

By age 11, Jarrod Overson was already teaching himself how to program and creatively use technology, including making video games on his graphing calculator for friends in math class. A few decades later, Overson is still working with technology to create innovative solutions that help others.

In the latest episode of the Next Matters Most podcast, Smashing Boxes CEO Nick Jordan spoke with the Silicon Valley transplant about his career history, his move to the Research Triangle and his new company, Vino Technologies, Inc.

New to the Research Triangle area, Overson was director of engineering at Shape Security, where he led the company’s Enterprise Defense development, the industry-leading solution against imitation attacks. His new business, Vino, provides a low-code application platform that is made of building blocks that you can reshare, remix and reuse anywhere.

In addition to recently starting Vino, Overson also co-wrote O’Reilly’s Developing Web Components and is the creator of Plato, a static analysis tool for web applications. He also speaks about his passion for using technology to help others, discusses modern web threats and cybercrime, and has been quoted by Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and CNET, among others.

Overson got the idea for Vino from his experience of working at large enterprises and seeing the issues that were preventing them from reaching their goals.

“I’ve seen so many times over and over again how teams can start working really quickly and produce a lot of value very rapidly, and then gradually, the vast majority of those teams just slow to a crawl,” said Overson.

He saw an opportunity to find a solution to this problem and looked at the foundation of application building to try and figure out where the biggest friction lies that makes things difficult to reuse and maintain.

Vino’s target customers are small companies that need to do a lot with less and medium-sized companies who are looking to scale platforms that are becoming difficult to maintain.
As someone who worked at Napster, an early digital music-streaming service that Overson described as “a right idea at the wrong time,” he hopes that Vino will be a right idea at the right time.

“It became a lot of fun when we started tackling the problem and realizing that it actually could be solved,” he said.

To learn more about Overson’s experiences and his plans for the future, check out the entire latest episode of the Next Matters Most podcast.

If you’re interested in participating in a future Next Matters Most podcast, send an email to nick@smashingboxes.com.