About me
I'm James Warrick. I write here about business, technology, and e-commerce — mostly about how those three things intersect, and what happens when they do.
What I do
I'm a co-founder of Corso, where we build post-purchase software for e-commerce merchants — returns, warranties, registrations, shipping protection, and the operational machinery behind them. We started in January 2022, and we've been deliberate about two things: hiring excellent people and then getting out of their way, and staying profitable so we control our own destiny.
How I got here
My career has mostly been about using technology to make businesses work better — sometimes by building the software myself, sometimes by leading the teams that do.
Before Corso I spent nearly two decades in the passenger transportation industry. This was across taxicab operations, special and medical transportation, and student logistics. During that time I managed operations, customer relations, and product and engineering leadership. I ran a 24/7 service center with more than two hundred representatives. I owned relationships with customers who individually represented over $100M in annual revenue, in a sector where compliance was relentless and the rules created a lot of work. Then I led product management and modernization work, moving systems off-premises and rebuilding them with a mix of internal and outsourced teams.
I didn't arrive at software from a computer science background — I arrived from the operations floor, where you just had to get stuff done and a nimble approach to software was a huge point of leverage.
I also spent eight years in the Utah Army National Guard as an aviation operations specialist, including a deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where I learned things that are hard to learn anywhere else.
Technology and design
I wrote my first program in Apple BASIC in elementary school, and dabbled in a ton of different technologies for a long time before finding myself writing code full-time. Along the way I developed a love for visual design — Aldus FreeHand in middle school (just to show how long it's been), then Quark, Photoshop, and web design back when <blink> and <marquee> were still fighting it out. I got involved in writing code again largely because I was tired of my UI designs being implemented poorly by people who were great engineers but didn't understand or care about the UX of the software they were writing.
I'm a generalist. I know enough to go deep when I need to, and I'd rather use a boring, well-understood tool than an exciting one. Postgres unless there's a reason not to. Buy before you build. Save the excitement for your vacation rather than for your on-call rotation.