John Shao
John Shao
About
Detail
Co-Founder & CTO
Washington, United States
I'm building the operational backbone for modern commerce.
At Pipe17, we connect the systems that actually run e-commerce — OMS, WMS, ERP, 3PL, payments, marketplaces — into one composable network. The brands and fulfillment providers running on us include American Express, Staples, Logitech, Estée Lauder, Radial, elf, Wyze, OluKai, and Black Rifle Coffee. The thesis is simple: commerce is too fragmented to keep stitching together with custom integrations and brittle middleware. We're building the network layer for it.
Before Pipe17, I spent 15+ years building and scaling engineering teams at Avaya, Spoken Communications (acquired by Avaya), Ayasdi, Oracle, and VMware — across contact center, conversational AI, ML platforms, and cloud infrastructure. The throughline has always been the same: take systems that weren't designed for the modern world, and rebuild them so they are.
I write about: — Order management, inventory, and the architecture of agentic commerce — Scaling multi-tenant SaaS on AWS and Kubernetes — What it actually takes to build and run a founding engineering team — The intersection of AI agents and operational software
Born in China, based in Seattle, fluent in English and Mandarin. Always happy to talk shop with founders, operators, and engineers building in commerce.
At Pipe17, we connect the systems that actually run e-commerce — OMS, WMS, ERP, 3PL, payments, marketplaces — into one composable network. The brands and fulfillment providers running on us include American Express, Staples, Logitech, Estée Lauder, Radial, elf, Wyze, OluKai, and Black Rifle Coffee. The thesis is simple: commerce is too fragmented to keep stitching together with custom integrations and brittle middleware. We're building the network layer for it.
Before Pipe17, I spent 15+ years building and scaling engineering teams at Avaya, Spoken Communications (acquired by Avaya), Ayasdi, Oracle, and VMware — across contact center, conversational AI, ML platforms, and cloud infrastructure. The throughline has always been the same: take systems that weren't designed for the modern world, and rebuild them so they are.
I write about: — Order management, inventory, and the architecture of agentic commerce — Scaling multi-tenant SaaS on AWS and Kubernetes — What it actually takes to build and run a founding engineering team — The intersection of AI agents and operational software
Born in China, based in Seattle, fluent in English and Mandarin. Always happy to talk shop with founders, operators, and engineers building in commerce.
