Hi there 👋

My name is Michael R. Bock. I'm a startup founder living and working in California.

I'm generally interested in technology, software architecture, scaling software organizations, startups, politics, autonomous vehicles, and cities.

I was the co-founder & CTO of Column Tax which I started in early 2021. Column Tax is the fastest-growing tax software company in US history, and we filed over >1M returns in our first 4 years. We raised $27M from Bain Capital Ventures, Felicis, & others. I hired & managed 50 amazing folks across Engineering, Product, & Design. Column Tax was acquired by Aiwyn in late 2025. Aiwyn has raised >$100M from Bessemer, KKR, & others.

I read and respond to every personal message I get. Contact me here.

Work history:

• Column Tax, 2021-
• Uber ATGAurora, 2019-2021
• Pioneer, 2019
• Waymo, 2017-2019
• Google/YouTube, 2015-2017
• Udacity, 2014-2015

Find me online:

• Twitter
• GitHub
• LinkedIn
• Stack Overflow
• Very old blog

Some projects I've worked on:

• SelfDriving.fyi: a comprehensive list of every company working on autonomous vehicles. You can listen to me talk about this project on this podcast.
• TopTweets.by: go to TopTweets.by/@username to easily see someone’s popular tweets.
• ReclaimIQ: a service that made it much easier to reclaim Unclaimed Property that's been handed over to the government (over $55 billion in the US)!
• Sesh: a way for engineers and designers to train more like athletes.
• Sludge: an app to reclaim the time we spend on social media and ensure that time actually aligns with our long-term goals.
• Detailed notes on the book Designing Data-Intensive Applications and an associated Anki deck.
• CarCraft: Waymo's simulated world for testing self-driving cars.
• Some things I launched at Pioneer.
• InnerTube: YouTube's first-party API for iOS/Android/Web/TV.
• Udacity's first public API (here's some ancient documentation I wrote).
• The Edmunds.com API and associated wrappers.

I also (very) ocassionally angel invest (mostly in friends' companies who I want to support and follow along with). I can sometimes be helpful to other founders in the very early idea maze and with thinking through hiring strategy (especially hiring a first Head of Engineering). So far, I've invested in:

• interviewing.io
• Pulley
• Agent
• Taxwire
• Benbase

Looking to improve as a software engineer? Here are some resources I highly recommend:

• interviewing.io
• Pramp
• Triplebyte (RIP)
• A-List Wellfound
• Bradfield School of Computer Science CS Primer

To get notified (extremely rarely) when I publish a new post, subscribe here: