STEF OLTHOFF

Built a product to a $187M acquisition. Now building Bloom as employee #1.

Recent Projects
Bloom Pre-seed startup
Technical Founder
  • Notion meets Pinterest – Bloom is a reference studio for creative teams.
  • Technical strategy and vision – Building a fundamentally agent-oriented architecture and ensuring AI industry innovations are ours to exploit.
  • Solo technical team – In 5 months, users saved 21,000+ sources of inspiration. 150 MAU, ~50% retention among first week of sign-ups.
  • Agent architecture – iMessage, SMS, and in-app agent - Users talk to one agent with unified tooling for magical data interaction.
  • Performant media-rich grid – A Pinterest grid, but faster. Virtualization, Cloudflare Transforms, and a host of other strategies result in 0 CLS and ½ the memory usage of Pinterest
  • Paywalled usage tiers – Stripe integration, entitlements, metering, storage enforcement.
  • Automated testing – Hundreds of unit, integration, and E2E tests let us safely unleash AI coding tools while maintaining high standards.
Restaurant Sentiment Hospitality at scale
Lead Engineer at Wisely
  • Built Sentiment from concept to $1.1M ARR – one-third of company revenue. NLP engine ingesting reviews from 10+ sources in real time.
  • Product played a key role in Wisely's $187M acquisition by Olo in 2021. Now powers guest intelligence for 600+ restaurant brands.
NOAA Coastline Emergencies Responding to risk
Full-Stack Engineer at Tetra Tech
  • Led discovery, design, and full-stack development of a NOAA-funded coastal emergency simulation tool. Discovery session to live MVP in four weeks.
  • Built geospatial visualization and physics-based simulation UI for oil spills, debris tracking, and search-and-rescue scenarios used by coastal response authorities.
Technologies
TypeScript · Next.js · React · PostgreSQL · BullMQ · Redis · Docker · AWS · Cloudflare · Agents + Tooling
Engineering History
Bloom Technical Founder Nov 2025 – Present
Tetra Tech Full-Stack Engineer Jul 2023 – Sep 2025
NewFoundry Full-Stack Engineer Jun 2020 – Jun 2021
Wisely Lead Engineer, Sentiment Sep 2018 – Mar 2020
University of Michigan Software Engineer Sep 2017 – Sep 2018
Education
University of Michigan
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, 2018