YesPress Profile / Technology
The kernel hacker who cracked open email
She started with a Linux game install at 15. By 30, she'd co-founded the API layer that lets thousands of developers talk to Gmail, Outlook, and everything in between - without losing their minds.
The story starts with a video game and a desperate Linux install. Christine Spang was fifteen, her uncle was a Linux engineer, and the game she wanted didn't run on Windows. What followed was a decade-long dive into open-source software that would reshape her entire trajectory - from teenage Debian contributor to MIT student to Oracle engineer to company founder who raised $175 million.
Nylas was not planned as an infrastructure company. In 2013, Christine and her MIT co-founder Gleb Polyakov sat down to build what seemed like a solvable problem: a better email client. Within weeks, they hit the actual hard part. Getting data in and out of email providers - Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, dozens of others - each with their own protocols, auth flows, edge cases, and undocumented quirks. Every developer who wanted email integration faced the same wall.
Instead of building around the wall, they became the wall - the good version of it. Nylas absorbed that complexity so developers didn't have to. One API call to connect any email provider. Calendar sync, contact management, scheduling, and later AI-powered features, all delivered through the same unified layer. The product no one planned to build turned out to be exactly what the industry needed.
By the time Nylas closed its Series C in June 2021 - $120 million, bringing total funding to $175 million, backed by investors including 8VC, Spark Capital, and Formation 8 - Christine had been in the trenches for nearly a decade: writing code, building the team, pitching investors, and driving the company through multiple pivots and a pandemic. The frustration that started Nylas ("there's gotta be a better way") became the company's operating thesis, embedded in every product decision and every hiring conversation.
She served as CEO through Nylas's growth phase before transitioning to the Board of Directors in late 2025, stepping into the role of Founder and shareholder representative as Jeff Koets took over as CEO. The transition marked the natural arc of a founder who had taken the company from two people at MIT to a 92-person enterprise API platform - a journey that required her to evolve from writing kernel patches to building a company culture.
Age 15. A game she wanted only ran on Linux. Her uncle helped her get it working. That installation opened a door she never closed. Within months she was a Debian contributor, packaging software for one of the world's most widely used Linux distributions.
The Debian Women diversity outreach program gave her a path and a community. Those open-source connections were her first professional network - and they got her work before she ever wrote a resume. She never had to apply for a job until after graduating from MIT.
Computer Science at MIT, with undergraduate research at the Media Lab's Tangible Media Group. The place where she met future co-founders, gained the technical depth to build serious infrastructure, and developed the conviction that hard problems were worth solving from scratch.
Post-MIT, she joined Ksplice - the company that built technology to apply Linux kernel security patches without rebooting. The kind of deep infrastructure work that runs quietly under critical systems worldwide. Oracle acquired Ksplice. She stayed as a principal developer.
In 2013, she and Gleb Polyakov set out to build a better open-source email client. The hardest part - connecting to email providers - became the entire company. Nylas was born from the recognition that the infrastructure layer was the real product.
Six funding rounds. Investors including 8VC, Spark Capital, Round13 Capital, and Formation 8. A $120M Series C in 2021. From two engineers frustrated by email protocols to a 92-person company powering communication APIs for thousands of enterprise developers.
Nylas provides a unified API that lets developers integrate email, calendar, and contact data from any provider - Gmail, Outlook, Exchange, Yahoo, and more - through a single integration. Instead of each developer team reverse-engineering provider APIs individually, Nylas handles authentication, sync, edge cases, and data normalization.
The platform powers scheduling, email automation, CRM integrations, communication features, and AI-driven workflows for enterprises across healthcare, real estate, recruiting, sales, and beyond. Its bi-directional sync and developer-friendly SDKs cut integration time from months to days.
Christine's path from systems engineer to company founder is not the typical Silicon Valley narrative. She did not start with a pitch deck - she started with a kernel patch. The technical credibility she built over a decade in open source and at Ksplice gave Nylas a product grounded in genuine understanding of the infrastructure it was replacing.
Running a company as CTO and then CEO required a different kind of work. In interviews, she has been candid about the challenge: at some point you have to shift your focus from building products to running a business. You invest in the team, step back from the code, and start focusing on what it takes to scale. For a founder who started by reading man pages and writing Perl scripts, that transition was earned rather than assumed.
Her advocacy for gender diversity in tech is equally grounded in observation. She has noted that gender balance at Nylas actually declined as the company matured and hired more senior people - a pattern that repeats across the industry. Her response was not abstract: she pushed for active involvement in Lesbians Who Tech, Dev Color, and Women Who Code, and called directly for investors to hire women into positions with actual check-writing authority.
In 2024, Christine launched the Platform Builders podcast alongside Isaac Nassimi, SVP Product at Nylas. The show focuses on the people building the infrastructure layer of modern SaaS - developers who think about APIs, developer experience, and integration complexity not as afterthoughts but as core product strategy.
The podcast reflects a consistent thread in her career: the belief that the infrastructure is the story. Whether it was Debian packages, Linux kernel patches, email APIs, or now the conversation about the future of SaaS, she gravitates toward the layer that most people take for granted until it breaks.
She speaks regularly at industry events - Web Summit Lisbon, SF CTO Summit, Citi Ventures Enterprise Tech Summit, Infobip Shift - and her GitHub profile (username simply: spang) still shows her talk materials from PyCon 2014. The talk was on information retrieval. The code still compiles.
"Be ok letting go - at some point, you'll need to shift your focus from building products to running a business and invest in a great team."Christine Spang - on the founder-to-CEO transition
"Fund women and hire women into positions that have the authority to cut checks - diversifying who makes funding decisions is the best way to break the pattern."Christine Spang - on diversity in venture capital
She installed Linux on her family computer as a teenager to play a video game that wouldn't run on Windows. Her uncle, a Linux engineer, walked her through it. The game barely mattered. The operating system changed everything.
Until after college graduation, Christine never formally applied for a job. Her open-source reputation and Debian community connections were enough. The resume came later - the network came first.
Her GitHub username is simply "spang" - no numbers, no prefixes, just the name. That kind of handle only happens when you sign up early enough and mean it. The account still has her PyCon 2014 talk materials on information retrieval.
Nylas launched as an open-source email client. The hardest engineering problem - connecting to email providers - became the product. The company exists because the original plan failed in exactly the right place.
At Ksplice/Oracle, Christine worked on technology that patched running Linux kernels without rebooting the system. The infrastructure runs silently under critical systems worldwide and most users have no idea it exists. She liked it that way.
One of her Heavybit podcast appearances was titled "Solarpunk with Christine Spang" - a signal that her thinking extends well beyond API endpoints. She's engaged with questions about technology, community, and what kind of future the industry is actually building toward.
Christine co-hosts this podcast with Isaac Nassimi (SVP Product at Nylas), focused on the leaders building the infrastructure layer of modern SaaS - developer tools, APIs, and the future of platform businesses.
Scott Hanselman interviews Christine on her path from Debian packages as a teenager to co-founding Nylas. One of the clearest tellings of her origin story. (April 2018)
A candid look at Nylas's pivot from email client to API platform, the hard decisions that shaped the company, and what it took to find the right product-market fit.
A wider-ranging conversation covering the intersection of building a company, open-source culture, and sustainable personal practices for founders. (July 2019)