Get to know Propeller’s world-class team in our new, ongoing employee spotlight series. Today, we talk to Taylor Wilson, a tech support engineer, based in our Denver office.
What do you do at Propeller?
As a technical support engineer, I help our customers stay successful with our hardware products (PPK and AeroPoints). That means that I’m answering reactive text and phone support requests, as well as creating new content to proactively help customers find the information they need. I also do a lot of internal testing for products to develop more robust troubleshooting techniques.
What’s your career background?
I was in university from 2011 to 2017 chasing two bachelor’s degrees—electrical engineering and geoscience—at which point I started working in the marine science industry for a company called Nortek. I sold hardware solutions that monitored physical oceanography, basically current and wave monitors. Upon relocating to Denver for personal reasons, I wanted to stay in the remote sensing market and found Propeller—thought it would be a great fit.
Before working at Propeller, what’s the strangest or most interesting job you’ve held?
I’ve done a couple. The first of which was as a guide for a canoe camp in northern Canada with 10- to 12-year-old boys on five- to 10-day trips. Definitely can be a hard time to work with kids, so a lot of learning experiences for me, as far as patience and wrangling children in the woods goes.
The other was as a barista in a coffee shop in Boston called Ogawa, where I competed in a latte art competition. I learned from Haruna Murayama, who was the first woman and Japanese world latte art champion. I competed and beat one person, once, so I’m a “winner,” but not a high-tier winner
Where are you from? Where have you lived?
I grew up in Westchester County, New York, which is about an hour north of New York City. I lived there until I went to university at 18. I moved to Boston to attend Northeastern University, and spent the rest of my time there before moving to Denver.
What’s your favorite Propeller memory?
The christmas party in 2018 was an absolute blast. We rented out an adventure space and played all sorts of fairly intense team games, some of which got a little physical. I think we all needed some time to enjoy an environment full of climbing, bouncing, and hurling things at each other for fun.
If you could be any piece of worksite equipment, what would you be and why?
I’m not an expert in equipment used on worksites, so this is a difficult one for me. I really enjoy geology, so being a rock crusher would be fun. Getting to the bottom of what’s in the material, what people are pulling out of the ground could be really interesting.
If you could attend any professional sports game, what would it be and why?
While I am a huge hockey fan, I also really love video games—so I’ll include that under “sports.” I’d attend the International, a DoTA 2 tournament hosted by Valve. It’s got a $25M prize pool and has teams competing from all over the world. The game is a five-versus-five team game—it’s full name is Defense of The Ancients. I played competitively on teams during college.
If you could do any job at worksite for just one day, which would you choose?
Considering my engineering background, I love dealing with technical problems, very “in the weeds” stuff. So to work alongside Fred and Angus on our hardware team and learn what we’re looking to accomplish as a company from a hardware and design perspective—I’d really appreciate that.
Any fun facts, talents, or superpowers to share?
I was my canoe camp’s best canoeist for a year, I won the Gunn Canoe trophy in its 90th year. It was a competition based on dressing up the boat to carry it and go on trips with it. We also competed in an obstacle course on a lake in three ways: sitting in the bow (which is the front), the stern (which is the back), and solo. I competed against 19 other people and I was victorious.
