# Christine Yen

> Christine Yen is the co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb, an observability company built around helping engineering teams investigate software in production. An MIT computer science graduate and former Parse/Facebook engineer, she previously co-founded Venuetastic. Her public work connects detailed software data with collaboration, learning and human judgment. She is based in the Greater Reno Area and writes about books, engineering and startup lessons.

- **Role:** Co-founder and CEO at Honeycomb
- **Organizations:** Honeycomb, Parse, Facebook, Venuetastic, Aardvark, Google, Ridejoy
- **Education:** B.S. in Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- **Known for:** Co-founded Honeycomb with Charity Majors and became its CEO in 2019., Co-founded Y Combinator Winter 2011 company Venuetastic., Co-authored Osprey distributed-database research published at ICDE 2010.

## Career timeline

- **2009** — Graduated from MIT; worked at Aardvark and moved to San Francisco.
- **2010** — Worked at Google following its acquisition of Aardvark; co-founded Venuetastic with Helen Belogolova.
- **2011** — Venuetastic participated in Y Combinator Winter 2011; Yen left at year-end.
- **2012** — Built the Ridejoy iPhone app and joined Parse as a software engineer.
- **2013** — Parse was acquired by Facebook; Yen continued working on analytics products.
- **2015** — Left Parse/Facebook; built the Groupthink Reddit relationship visualization project and began work with Charity Majors on Honeycomb.
- **2016** — Honeycomb began its public work on modern observability.
- **2019** — Became Honeycomb CEO in spring, with Charity Majors becoming CTO.
- **2023** — Announced Honeycomb’s $50 million Series D, led by Headline.
- **2025** — Announced Honeycomb’s first acquisition, Grit.
- **2026** — Joined Charity Majors for a founders retrospective on observability and AI.

## Achievements

- Co-founded Honeycomb with Charity Majors and became its CEO in 2019.
- Co-founded Y Combinator Winter 2011 company Venuetastic.
- Co-authored Osprey distributed-database research published at ICDE 2010.
- Selected as a 2025 BigDATAwire Person to Watch.
- Led Honeycomb when it announced a $50 million Series D in April 2023 and the Grit acquisition in April 2025.

## Latest updates

- **2026-02** — Honeycomb published a founders retrospective and follow-up Q&A featuring Yen and Charity Majors on observability’s evolution and AI.
- **2025-04** — Yen announced Honeycomb’s acquisition of Grit, its first acquisition, to combine codebase analysis and AI expertise with observability.
- **2025-01** — Appeared on Dash0’s Code RED podcast to discuss the production incident behind Honeycomb, high-cardinality data and developer/operator collaboration.

## Links

- Website: https://christineyen.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christineyen
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/cyen
- GitHub: https://github.com/christineyen
- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/cyen.bsky.social
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christineyen/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/christineyen

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/christine-yen
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-21