Eva Matova

My name is Eva and I'm from Czechia. I studied Russian translation at university, that was supposed to be my path. For a few years it was: I worked as a project coordinator at a power engineering company. Then things shifted, my field got affected by what was happening in the world, and I had to rethink my career.

I had been curious about programming for a long time, partly because my boyfriend is a software engineer and watching him work made it feel less abstract. There was a boom of programming courses in Czechia at the time, so I took the chance and started from zero, spending evenings building little card games and trying to make sense of JavaScript.

A few months later, I found a job as a frontend engineer at a digital agency. That first year was hard. I was learning fast, building real products for real clients, and constantly feeling behind. Impostor syndrome was a daily companion. But I kept going. My partner became my mentor, and I owe him a lot of who I am as a developer today.

A year later, I joined Native, an American startup building a B2B AI conversation platform. For a language enthusiast like me, it was a dream. Over three years I grew from frontend engineer to senior product engineer, architecting real-time WebSocket systems, driving activation growth, working closely with design and product. That place taught me how much of engineering is actually about people, trade-offs, and listening.

After 15 years of building iOS apps for banks, e-commerce, B2C startups, and other industries, I decided to take the leap and build my own apps.

I love being able to work on my own products and seeing them slowly gain traction. It s very rewarding having something yours out there solving some people s problems.