Hi, my name is Andrew Bellay and I’m a jack-of-all-trades, a generalist, a polymath, a MetaNeer.

Looking for a bio that you can copy-paste someplace? You know – the ones that are awkwardly written in the third person? You got it.

Short Bio – Andrew Bellay

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Andrew Bellay is a strategic, process-oriented, technical, entrepreneurial, and client-facing jack-of-all-trades. He’s founded 3 companies and worked with hundreds more as a technology strategist, designer, developer, advisor, and investor. Currently, Andrew runs MetaNeer Labs – a software development firm located in the San Francisco Bay Area – and writes for Straty.com. His formal education includes a Bachelors of Science in Chemical Engineering, a Bachelors of Arts in Liberal Arts from UT Austin, and a Masters of Science in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University.

Looking for a real bio? Something actually personal? Keep reading.

I’m an inherently curious, strategic, process-oriented, and entrepreneurial person.

My formal education trained me to be extremely technical, clear & direct in my communication, and savvy about managing the process of innovation within both young and mature businesses.

My real world experiences have forced me to hone these skills and to pick up many others that you can’t learn from any book you’ll find on a course syllabus.

Early Life

I’m a Texas boy, born to two engineers and steeped in technology from a very young age. I love being outside and earned the rank of Eagle as a Boy Scout. Burning Man, in Nevada’s high desert, is now my favorite camping spot.

I attended an all-boys Catholic school run by Cistercian monks in the woods outside of Dallas for 8 years. Their strict classical liberal arts curriculum and the primacy of education at home made me a life-long learner early.

I attended UT Austin for 4 years where I earned a Chemical Engineering degree and a Liberal Arts degree (called Plan II Honors).

During college years, I got my hands into a lot of cookie jars: blending 3% of the nation’s gasoline supply for ExxonMobil as a co-op, re-founding one of the campus newspapers, launching a nano venture fund to partner with student teams who were interested in alternative forms of power generation, publishing research out of a lab focused on fuel cells, experimenting with polyphasic sleep for 3 months, brewing nine 5-gallon batches of beer, writing a thesis about the tradeoffs between recycling and reusing glass bottles, before finally catching the entrepreneurship bug.

Entrepreneurship & Venture Capital

Knowing that I wanted to learn more about entrepreneurship, I applied to Stanford’s MS in Manage Science & Engineering and spent 15 months studying entrepreneurial theory with some of Silicon Valley’s best entrepreneurs and academics.

I jumped head-first into Silicon Valley by leveraging my previous experience as a print editor to become the VC & Money Editor for AlwaysOn – an online publication by Tony Perkins. I had the privilege of interviewing the top tier venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, including: Tim Draper (DFJ), Greg Gretsch (Sigma Partners), Jeff Bussgang (Flybridge Capital Partners), Tim Chang (Norwest Venture Partners), Woody Benson (Prism VentureWorks), Victor Boyajian (Global Chair of the Venture Technology Group, SNR Denton).

While covering the Venture Capital sector at AlwaysOn, I also worked with awesome VCs, entrepreneurs, writers, and innovators like Bill Gurley (Benchmark Capital), Tim Draper (Draper Fisher Jurvetson), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), Mark Cuban (Owner of the Dallas Mavericks), Steve Blank (serial entrepreneur and Stanford professor), Dave McClure (500 Startups), Mark Suster (GRP Partners), Jeff Bussgang (Flybridge Capital Partners), Bijan Sabet (Spark Capital), Greg Gretsch (Sigma Partners), Rob Go (NextView Ventures), Paul Kedrosky (Financial Blogger and CNBC Commentator), and Chamillionaire + Tony Perkins + Mike Arrington + Robert Scoble.

I used to follow the mobile advertising sector closely and I was told that my article on Mobclix was used during the final negotiations for Velti’s acquisition of Mobclix.

While I was wrapping up my masters, I bought my first mac and taught myself to code with an emphasis on development for the iPhone and iPad – an ecosystem which had just been opened up to developers.

MetaNeer Labs & FounderSoup

My co-founder, Weston McBride and I founded MetaNeer Labs (meta + engineer) in 2010, sold our first contracts, and began developing software for the higher education market. A year later we were acqui-hired into a mobile payments company. I left 3 months later to escape the terrible work environment and refocused MetaNeer on the growing iOS development market.

During this same period several other Stanford grads and I got together to create FounderSoup, a networking organization that brought together technical and non-technical founders in order to form new start-ups.

We worked with about 220 other companies, including Door Dash, Knotch, NoRedInk, Wello (acquired by Weight Watchers), Ravel Law (acquired by LexisNexis) and WatchUp (acquired by Plex).

Since 2010 I’ve consulted with dozens of companies to help them clarify, define, design, and develop their mobile and web applications. Learn more about MetaNeer.

Straty

These days I spend a lot of time thinking, writing, and speaking about strategy at various Bay Area universities, meet-ups, and incubators. I’ve done one form or another of strategy consulting with all of my clients over the years and I find the work incredibly fulfilling – helping to bridge an important gap between theory and practice.

If you want a taste, start with my essay What is Strategy?

Formal Education

My formal education was a great foundation for the technical, persuasive, and business skills I’ve developed since leaving academia:

Featured Work

Over the years, my work has been featured in:

(This page was last updated in Aug 2018)