Ted loves building businesses, products, and teams that make a meaningful difference in the world. Over the past two decades, he’s assembled an extensive track record of successfully launching products and leading high-performing teams through challenging situations.
Product & Engineering
Ted Mao
Highlights
Ted joined Google in 2004, when it was still just a promising startup in the search space. Over the next 8 years, he led engineering teams on Developer Infrastructure, AdWords, Java Infrastructure, and Internal Applications.
Square
Over his 8-year tenure at Square, Ted worked on making commerce easier for sellers across all of Square’s markets. He spent the first few years leading Payments, including card processing, merchant settlement, risk, reconciliation, and billing. Later, he led a variety of product and infrastructure teams on Square Capital and Square Financial Services, Square’s bank subsidiary.
Bond
As VP of Engineering and later CTO at Bond, Ted led the development of the company’s banking as a service platform. Bond’s platform now supports a variety of financial products including deposit accounts, debit cards, and credit cards, as well as extensive tools for monitoring and managing active programs.
Ted loves when all of the hard work he puts into building highly effective teams and reliable systems visibly comes together, often in a moment of crisis. He also enjoys seeing former mentees take flight in new roles.
Superpowers
Practical and principled engineering
Technology decisions are always a series of tradeoffs. Ted leads with principles first and finds a healthy balance between fast, decisive decision-making and strategic, forward-looking planning. He believes that clear ownership and accountability are paramount for executing quickly.
Bridging business and technology
Ted knows that product and engineering must always be in the service of customer and business success. He ensures that technology projects are always clearly tied to business outcomes and that every individual on his team understands how their work is contributing to the broader company goals.
