Meet the Ware Force: Joseph Moster

As a young company, hiring the right people is crucial to success. We’re proud of the culture we’re building at Ware and want you to meet the people behind our warehouse automation technology. These are the people that make it happen.

We’re beginning the series with our two co-founders that started it all: Ian Smith and Joseph (Joe) Moster.

This week, we caught up with Joe. Keep reading to learn more about him, what a typical day as CTO looks like, and how he learned to fly a plane before driving a car.

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Name: Joseph Moster

Role: CTO and Co-founder

Location: San Francisco, CA

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Q - Can you tell us a little about your background?

A - I grew up in Raleigh, NC. I went to college at North Carolina State University, where I got both my bachelor’s and master’s degree in aerospace engineering. During my time at college, I built drones for an international academic competition and I really enjoyed doing that. Coming out of grad school, I had an opportunity to join a start up in Newport Beach, CA, building a commercial drone platform. I worked there for around four years, and I gained experience with everything from integrating autopilot in new drones, test flights, and test automation frameworks, all the way up to application code to enable the drone to do roof surveying for insurance companies.

After that, I moved to Pennsylvania to work on self driving cars at Uber, where I worked with communication protocols for the vehicle. However, I was still working on drones in my free time and realized this is where I wanted my focus to be.

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Q - How did Ware start?
A - We started to see the industry challenges in relation to warehouse inventory management and realized there was potential to solve this problem with drone-based technology. Looking at previous lessons learned, we knew we wanted to focus on the software rather than creating our own hardware, and that’s one of the reasons we decided to partner with Skydio as our drone company.

Ian and I were introduced to each other by a mutual friend of ours, and we had the same vision and goals for the company straight away. One of our first in-person meetings was actually at Sightglass coffee, which is now immediately next door to our new Ware office in San Francisco, California.

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Q - What do you like most about working at Ware?

A - The thing that stands out most to me is the company culture and the atmosphere. We’ve worked really hard to keep a very open culture. We wanted to make sure that Ware was a place where people feel free to bring ideas to the table, they have independence to execute on them, and that we can rely on each other to help each other out. We work as a team. People feel free to share what they’re working on or their problems without worrying about what people are going to think or say. It’s something that we’ve worked hard to build.

Q - What does a typical day in the life of your role look like?

A - A typical day starts with me meeting all the different teams I oversee: deployment, engineering, operations. I join to make sure I have awareness but really more so I can lend context from the broader picture of the company and what’s important to us, and also what’s going to be the most impactful for our customers. When I do get to code, I’m typically working on the back end autonomy for how we plan flights and analyze data.

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Q - What do you like to do in your spare time?
A - A lot of what we do here at Ware are also my hobbies, which is partially what makes it so enjoyable to work here. Outside of work, one of the most beneficial things about living in San Francisco is that it’s the perfect temperature for biking - most of the year. Golden Gate Park is one of my favorite places to bike but the most exciting is riding over Golden Gate Bridge or going up Hawk Hill because you get absolutely incredible views going out of the city.

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Q - Tell us a fun fact about yourself.

A - I actually flew a plane before I ever drove a car! My high school had an Introduction to Aviation club and in freshman year I was able to go and do a test flight, with an instructor of course.

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‍See how our inventory control technology can increase your ROI. Get a demo today.

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