Katherine
Vargo

I'm Katie Vargo. For 30 years I built Linux systems and Kubernetes clusters, most recently at Microsoft, and I led the teams that ran them. On weekends, I was racing Ironman triathlons.

Now I train clients and teach group fitness at a University and community center. I work with first-timers, athletes coming back from an injury, and people who were told years ago what their body could not do. My job is to build the consistency that carries them to a goal they did not think was theirs.

I also paddle with the Pittsburgh Paddlefish. Dragon boat puts twenty paddlers and a drummer in one hull, so someone has to get all twenty to the dock on a Tuesday night.

DragonSignUp started because I got fed up with the ads on our SignUpGenius page. On the free plan they were everywhere, and they turned a two-minute task into a chore. On top of that, we had people handling waitlists by hand, juggling seats, and answering texts every time someone needed to drop from practice.

That is a solvable problem, and I have spent 30 years solving problems like it. So I built what our team needed. You want to know if you have a seat. You want the boat full on race weekend. Someone drops, the next paddler on the list gets the seat, and the steersperson sees the boat before getting to the dock.