James Hawkins is a pragmatic, product-focused co-CEO and co-founder based in San Francisco with six years of hands-on startup leadership and engineering experience. He helped grow PostHog into an open-source analytics platform used by 140k businesses and a 375k-strong developer community, while still contributing front-end and full-stack improvements to core repos. Comfortable oscillating between strategy, sales, and code, he previously built teams and profitable divisions from scratch and closed multi‑million dollar enterprise deals. Known for a sarcastic wit that masks earnest helpfulness, he blends Cambridge-trained economic thinking with a hacker’s attention to UX and product detail.
6 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Y Combinator
BA Economics, BA Economics at University of Cambridge
Contributions:729 reviews, 528 commits, 778 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on updating and modifying the website's front-end components. They modified the homepage layout, including image updates and adding links to images. Further contributions involved changes to the footer, header, and layout components, indicating a focus on overall website structure and design. The commits included changes in CSS and React, demonstrating their skills in web development and user interface design.
🦔 PostHog provides open-source web & product analytics, session recording, feature flagging and A/B testing that you can self-host. Get started - free.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:4 reviews, 48 commits, 33 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on front-end development, refactoring and improving the user interface using React. They updated several components, including the sidebar, action logs, and setup pages, enhancing the overall user experience. The user also integrated video playback functionality in the demo, indicating a focus on feature implementation and user interface enhancements. Additionally, they made minor updates to backend settings and documentation links.
pythonabtestingdata-warehouseself-hostjavascript
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