Ernest Koe

Ernest Koe is a serial entrepreneur and software developer who specializes in helping people build great teams and products. He transforms ideas into strategy, strategy into designs, designs into plans, plans into teams, and teams into code. He uses the term “code” figuratively at the strategy and systems level, as well as literally at the technical substrate of software systems.

He does this by asking the right questions, creating the right team, and solving the right problems in an interdisciplinary way. Koe is driven by the conviction that all code should operate at the human scale for human goals. Instead of prioritizing industrialized, homogenized ideals, he believes we can make America great again. We can do ‘teams,’ ‘companies,’ and ‘work’ differently, creating systems that help people reimagine the way they see and construct their worlds at scale.

Born in Malaysia, Koe lived in the tin-mining towns and emergent megacities in Southeast Asia before being transplanted to the United States at an early age. Having come from the dirt roads of the rainforests to the virtual highways of today, he navigates social systems, cultural borders, and communities effortlessly. This too, he believes, is about code – a lifelong, embedded knowledge of transpiling systems across cultural faultlines.

Koe earned his B.A. in East Asian Studies (History, Philosophy) from Wesleyan University. Before rejecting law school for the startup entrepreneurial life and co-founding his first software technology company in 1999, He was a World History and Chinese Language teacher to middle school and high school students at the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut, a role he considers to be singularly important.

A teacher and problem-solver at heart, Koe has spoken at numerous tech and education conferences. He has also taught UX design classes and conducted workshops for developers and teams around the world. As a software developer, he has over twenty years of hands-on experience designing, architecting, and developing enterprise-class software systems for world-class organizations. He has been a thought leader and technology changemaker on design and enterprise architecture for decades.

He has devoted his life to the business of building resilient, purpose-driven teams, companies, and software that contribute to the larger human project: creating a fairer, more peaceful and prosperous world. One of many ways Koe contributes personally is as the co-founder and CEO of Proof, a technology software and services company focused on organizations working to serve their communities and the greater social good. He is also a co-founder of PauseOnError, edSocialMedia, and former Co-Founder and CTO of inRESONANCE.

In all of his work, Koe aims to design and deliver code across all levels, helping executives understand deep technical matters and helping technical teams understand broader strategic goals. At this junction, Koe hopes to ask the right questions, craft the right teams, and solve the right problems.