# Nick Spreen > Building Apps at Hockey Labs • 70,000 users across different apps Location: New York, New York, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/nickspreen “As an experienced technical founder and CTO, I have built more products from scratch than most. I find it hard to resist good product ideas. Thinking of a technical challenge on Friday, I often find myself deploying a demo of a new product by Monday. Wanting to find out how things work & improving my own skills are two of my driving forces. All of these experiences have turned me into a driven entrepreneur and a top-tier freelancer. Few moments have impacted my life as much as getting the O-1 visa for individuals with extraordinary abilities. Most people in my network get big ticket VC investments or work for renown FAANG companies to fulfill the O-1 criteria. Getting this visa as a freelancer was a long process and is one of the achievements I’m most proud of. I strive for excellence, and only put my name on work that I’m proud of. I have high standards for the projects & companies I work with, and aim to have even higher standards for myself. You won’t find me cutting corners and compromising on quality. I don’t settle when it comes to the work I do. Contact me today — let’s build something great together.” ## Work Experience ### Founder @ Hockey Labs, Inc. Jan 2022 – Present | New York, New York, United States ### Software Engineering Consultant @ Self Employed Jan 2020 – Present | New York City, New York, Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika ### Software Engineer @ Self Employed Jan 2017 – Present | München und Umgebung, Deutschland ### Cloud Engineering Consultant @ Vectornator by Linearity Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | Remote Vectornator is the most intuitive and precise illustration software in the galaxy. It empowers its users to design anything you can imagine up to 30% faster. Creating sophisticated illustrations, spectacular layout mockups, and expressive lettering on the go. While the macOS and iOS app of the product is already fully developed, the cloud architecture on Azure and AWS was still in its infancy when Yannick helped the company build its cloud stack. Yannick reduced the monthly server hosting costs by 95% with just a few hours of downtime in the first five months he worked for the company. Since then, Yannick supported the company with continued efforts to improve and expand the backend architecture. ### Cloud Engineering Consultant @ Structured Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | Berlin, Berlin, Germany ### Product Engineering @ Pineapple AF, PBC Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | New York, New York, United States ### Mobile Engineering Consultant @ RIEDEL Communications Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | Berlin, Berlin, Germany ### Web Development Consultant @ immowelt Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | Hamburg, Germany ### Founder & CPO @ Bubble Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Berlin, Germany In just a couple of months, Yannick and his fellow co-founders built a feature-complete v1.0 of a consumer social iOS application. As the leading full-stack engineer, Yannick built a Kubernetes microservice architecture to process, render, and deliver video files globally. Through the use of many GCP technologies, latencies and performance were improved >15x by employing state-of-the-art CDN configurations. The iOS application rendered multi-layered videos in real time with AVMutableComposition Layers. ### Independent iOS Consultant @ T-Systems International Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Berlin, Germany During the COVID-19 pandemic, the EU decided to standardize digital vaccination certificates in the form of a mobile phone app. In early 2021, Yannick kicked off the open-source development of this application as the lead iOS developer. The goal of this app is to use state-of-the-art encryption to validate vaccination certificates across all EU member countries. Therefore the open-source and EC-encryption approach was key to the success of the multi-platform project. The three iOS repositories Yannick created for the project can be found here: https://github.com/eu-digital-green-certificates/dgca-wallet-app-ios ### Co-Founding Partner @ Tinus Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Munich, Bavaria, Germany Yannick supported Tinus during their first round of fundraising. Together with Tinus' two other co-founders, he created and refined the startup's pitch and pitch deck, ultimately leading them to get supported by multiple regional and country-wide startup programs. He also aided in Tinus' tech stack decisions and technology challenges. ### Founder & COO @ School Night, Inc. Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | New York, New York, United States Yannick had the fortunate opportunity to launch and grow School Night throughout 2020, which was based in New York City and focused on consumer social products. For their pre-seed investment, Yannick and his cof-ounder successfully raised over $1M from international investors. Yannick designed a software architecture around scaling real-time media streaming with WebRTC. The app for iOS devices was built in Swift. ### Data Scientist @ kutalla GmbH Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | München und Umgebung, Deutschland ### Software Engineer @ BrainTree IT Solutions GmbH Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | München und Umgebung, Deutschland ### Hilfswissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter @ TU Braunschweig Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | Braunschweig und Umgebung, Deutschland ## Education ### Visiting Researcher (Master's Thesis) in Computer Science, Bioinformatics Rutgers University Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 ### Master of Science - MS in Informatik Technical University of Munich Jan 2017 – Jan 2020 ### Bachelor of Science - BS in Informatik Technische Universität Braunschweig Jan 2014 – Jan 2017 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/yspreen - Website: https://yspreen.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/nickspreen JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/nickspreen/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-23