Jeff Rick introduced his new company by naming his friends. In September 2023, announcing Maitri Services, he put Julie Ditta and Robert Woollam near the beginning. The company name, he explained, meant friendship. After a career spent designing software and running engineering teams, he had chosen a word that belonged as comfortably at a dinner table as in a business proposal.
There is a certain audacity in this. Software companies can find an impressive name merely by removing a vowel. Rick chose one that invited a rather more personal examination: how do you behave toward the people who work with you? A name like Maitri gives the customer, and the colleague, something to remember when the conversation becomes difficult.
Rick is Maitri’s co-founder and chief executive. His earlier work includes engineering leadership at Intranets.com, WebEx and Cisco, and founding roles at Rezzonate and Deerwalk. The titles supply the professional outline. The more interesting question is what someone carries from one company into the next. In his case, familiar collaborators feature prominently.
A computer science degree, and a succession of practical problems
Rick studied computer science at Tufts University. An early Deerwalk biography describes him as an engineer and architect who had already led groups delivering web applications for businesses of different sizes. Before the chief executive title came the work of deciding how software should function, then helping other people make it function.
His career record places him at Intranets.com from 2000, WebEx from 2005 and Cisco from 2007. Read consecutively, those names suggest a useful education in scale. A development team’s decisions acquire different consequences as the organization around it grows. A feature still has to work; more people now have an opinion about when it should arrive.
The progression also helps explain why his present business deals with both product work and the organization required to deliver it. Someone must translate ambition into a sequence of decisions. Someone must decide which request belongs in the next release and which attractive distraction can wait. Technical leadership provides ample opportunities to disappoint people politely.
Rezzonate, where Rick was co-founder and chief technology officer, added another chapter. Deerwalk followed, with Rick serving first as CTO and later as chief operating officer. Architecture and operations are neighboring disciplines with an occasionally tense relationship: one imagines how the system ought to behave; the other meets it on a Monday morning.
Engineering
CTO, later COO
Co-founder & CEO
The customer gets a vote
Rick has a short question for founders: “who is your customer and do you have one yet?” He has described the experience behind it with unusual candor. An earlier venture built something without a sufficiently clear customer problem. The lesson he draws is to involve a prospective buyer in development, listening before the product becomes too elaborate to question.
That question has the manners of a pin at a balloon convention. It asks for a person where the presentation has supplied a market. It asks for a willingness to pay where the founder has supplied enthusiasm. A plausible audience can be assembled in a spreadsheet. A customer can decline the meeting.
For an engineer, the distinction has practical consequences. A product can be internally coherent, carefully made and still fail to earn a place in someone’s working day. Listening creates an opportunity to discover that problem while changes remain manageable. It gives the person expected to use the software a speaking part before the launch.
Rick’s March 2025 conversation with Agil Alizada returned to execution, validation, referrals and networks. Those subjects make a revealing set. They concern the work around the idea: checking whether it deserves investment, getting it delivered, and earning enough confidence that someone recommends you. The glamorous moment of invention has a considerable administrative entourage.
“who is your customer and do you have one yet?”
Jeff Rick
The colleagues who returned
Robert Woollam’s account of his Deerwalk years puts Rick among the people who offered him an opportunity to join the young company. Woollam later described its acquisition by Cedar Gate Technologies in December 2020, and the relationships he had built with colleagues in the United States and Nepal. His recollection gives Maitri’s founding a history beyond its incorporation.
When Rick, Ditta and Woollam began again together, they were bringing more than complementary job descriptions. They had a shared professional past. That does not remove the difficulties of starting a company. It does shorten the conversation about who the people across the table actually are.
Rick’s own launch announcement was direct about the friendship. He described helping friends, old and new, build products and improve companies. The language was modestly domestic for a business selling technical work. It placed a relationship at the center of a transaction that can otherwise become a discussion of hours, rates and availability.
Kathmandu belongs inside the story
In autumn 2023, Rick publicly celebrated the opening of Maitri’s Nepal office. The accompanying company announcement introduced Abhinayak Swar as its Nepal leader. By February 2024, Maitri was sharing news of Rick, Ditta and Woollam visiting the teams there to meet and collaborate with Swar.
The arrangement matters because the distance between a customer and an engineer can grow surprisingly large without anyone changing countries. Requirements pass through intermediaries. Assumptions harden into instructions. A question arrives after the decision it might have improved. Geography adds another reason to be deliberate about communication.
In an early interview about Maitri, Rick discussed pairing US executive leadership with teams in Nepal. The model puts responsibility on both sides of the relationship. The person discussing the work with the client needs enough technical understanding to make useful promises. The people building it need access to the reasoning behind those promises.
Maitri’s culture materials describe accessible leadership, trust and relationships across the organization. Such language is easy to print. Its practical test comes when a less senior person needs to raise an awkward concern. A friendly workplace should make that conversation possible before the concern becomes a delivery date.
Friendship has to survive the working week
The company describes executive visits to Kathmandu at least four times a year, alongside mentorship and promotion from within. These are company commitments, rather than a calendar of Rick’s personal movements. They nevertheless give the friendship premise some recognizable working arrangements: face time, opportunity and continued involvement.
There are also clubs, including adventure activities, cricket, futsal and Maitri Unplugged. Nobody should confuse a sports fixture with a sound management system. Still, colleagues need occasions to discover one another outside the narrow identities of a ticket queue. A person who helps resolve a production problem might also turn out to be inconveniently good at cricket.
One employee, Ronal Niraula, described a first month that included anniversary celebrations with Rick, Ditta and Woollam, as well as corporate futsal reaching the semifinals. It is a small account, with the scale of an actual working life. Joining a company means learning who people are while learning where the work lives.
The chief executive’s challenge is to preserve room for those encounters as the organization changes. Familiarity cannot depend entirely on everybody fitting into the same photograph. It needs habits that continue when teams expand and responsibilities divide.
New tools, familiar obligations
Maitri now offers agentic development alongside its traditional engineering services. Its current model pairs a dedicated engineer with specialized AI coding agents and an engagement manager. The company describes automated checks and human review as part of delivery. These are its stated operating methods, rather than independent measurements of performance.
For Rick, the change puts his earlier disciplines in a new setting. Faster code generation makes the question of what to build more consequential. An unclear requirement can now become a substantial amount of software with impressive speed. The customer question retains its usefulness, however fashionable the machinery becomes.
The human decisions remain legible: understand the problem, agree what success means, examine the result and accept responsibility for it. They connect the engineer who began with business applications to the executive now selling a different way of producing them. Tools change quickly. Explaining a promise still takes care.
That is an exacting position for a founder with an engineering background. The pleasure of making something can run ahead of the evidence that it is needed. Rick’s public advice gives curiosity a commercial task: ask another question, hear the answer, and allow it to change the plan. A useful conversation may leave the original proposal in rather poor condition. The eventual product can benefit from the damage.
A name with a recurring obligation
Rick’s aspiration is plain in the business he has chosen to lead: help other organizations build and grow, with people he knows and a delivery relationship spanning the United States and Nepal. It is a practical ambition, expressed through products, colleagues and customers rather than a grand prediction about the future.
The friendship in Maitri’s name makes a useful recurring demand. It asks whether the person taking the brief and the person implementing it feel part of the same undertaking. Rick has given his company a word that can be tested in ordinary conversation. Every new project offers another opportunity to deserve it.