Chelsea Handler wanted her phone to help her leave. A bad date, an uncomfortable dinner, a conversation that had exhausted its claim on the evening: a scheduled call or text could supply the necessary interruption. Tony Scherba and the team at Yeti helped turn that socially delicate requirement into Gotta Go. Software had found another job. This one involved making an excuse.
The collaboration appeared in Chelsea Does, putting a development studio inside a Netflix documentary. It made for an unusually entertaining demonstration of the work. But the question that runs through Scherba’s career begins when the demonstration ends. You can build the app. Can you also build the organization that delivers it, pays its people and finds another worthwhile problem to solve?
For Scherba, CEO and Founding Partner of Yeti, that has become a continuing assignment. He started with websites, worked on digital products for musicians and founded a company with fellow Northeastern student Rudy Mutter. Years later, the company itself remains something to work on. Its latest revision extends beyond developing software into helping build the businesses around it.
The pop star and the unfamiliar phone
His first audience had come for homemade jewelry. At 14, Scherba built ratemybling.net, inviting people to submit and rate improvised bling made from objects such as foil and old trophies. It was a suitably unserious beginning to a serious interest. The website gave him something to build, people to build it for and a reason to see what happened once they arrived.
Before Yeti, Scherba was studying computer science and business at Northeastern University. His co-op placements put those subjects into contact with actual customers. He worked with MIT’s Economics department, then with the Boston design studio Prod4Ever, later known as Icon Interactive. The work included websites for musicians such as Bob Dylan and Dave Matthews Band.
Then the iPhone offered another surface to build on. In an account of his early mobile work, Scherba recalled being approached by Britney Spears’ team about an app in 2009. There was a small complication: he did not yet know mobile development. He learned. The gap between accepting a project and knowing how to execute it had become part of his education.
The music work also supplied a lesson in audiences. A famous name can bring people to a product. What they find there still has to make sense. In discussing celebrity apps, Scherba described Gotta Go as a companion experience to Handler’s series. It had a particular role to play around an existing relationship between a performer and her audience.
That is a more precise brief than simply asking for an app because phones are popular. An audience, an occasion and a reason to open the thing give a developer somewhere to start. The novelty of the device eventually wears off. A useful or amusing action can survive it.
A filing fee, then a company
On October 14, 2010, Scherba went to Boston City Hall and registered Yeti LLC. He was still a student. The administrative beginning is pleasingly ordinary: a future company needed a filing fee before it needed a philosophy. Scherba and Mutter would have plenty of time to discover what the paperwork had committed them to.
He graduated in 2011 with a BS in Computer Science/Business. The university years had already supplied relationships that could turn into work. MIT’s Economics department became an early Yeti client. The boundary between student experience and professional experience was unusually porous; clients did not have to wait for commencement to become real.
A business, however, creates a second set of responsibilities alongside the assignment a customer can see. Someone must understand the accounts. Someone must decide how work is divided. Someone must ensure that enthusiasm survives the next invoice. Technical competence gets a company into the conversation. It does not settle these questions.
The company needed an operating system
Scherba has been willing to discuss the education he received after becoming a founder. Yeti’s early finances included an unpleasant encounter with taxes. He later wrote about the danger of mistaking money received for money available to spend. A large check near the end of the year can look festive. The calendar has other plans.
He also reconsidered the appeal of a completely flat organization. The hope was that people would organize themselves around shared goals. As the team grew, the arrangement became harder to sustain. A business coach compared it to operating a pirate ship. It was an evocative review of the management structure, if an awkward addition to the company brochure.
The correction involved taking leadership seriously as work. People need decisions, responsibilities and enough structure to exercise their skills. Freedom depends partly on knowing what you are responsible for and where someone else’s responsibility begins. Leaving those boundaries unspoken does not make the questions disappear; it distributes the task of guessing.
In their ten-year reflections, Scherba and Mutter described practices that gave company work a place in the schedule: quarterly goals, a monthly all-hands discussion and a brief daily huddle. They gave the meetings names, including Council of Yeti. The underlying problem was familiar. A business needs time to improve itself while its customers keep needing things.
“Our product is our process.”
Tony Scherba, in a 2019 interview
A studio is allowed to choose
By 2019, Scherba was describing a different ambition from increasing headcount for its own sake. He wanted a more profitable operation, better work and a working model that could accommodate a wider network of collaborators. The distinction matters in a service business, where adding people also adds a continuing obligation to find enough suitable work.
He spoke about enjoying the consultative part of the business. A client relationship could become a partnership over time. That preference helps explain why Yeti remained interesting to him: each assignment brought another problem, another organization and another set of constraints. The attraction was partly in working through those particulars.
In his writing on customer engagement and product planning, the same practical concern recurs. Building something does not guarantee a place in someone’s routine. People already have habits, alternatives and limited patience. A company has to understand those conditions before it adds its own interface to the pile.
Yeti’s 2016 guide to prototyping treated feedback as central to the exercise. A prototype gives a team something to test before the expensive commitments accumulate. The unfinished object has a job: expose a mistaken assumption while changing it is still manageable. A beautifully polished mistake is harder to part with.
The phone can meet the physical world
The portfolio also moved beyond experiences contained entirely on a screen. In 2020, Yeti described a self-scoring dart lounge for Punch Bowl Social. Cameras and computer vision detected where steel-tip darts landed on a regulation board. The software had to account for something thrown across a room, which is a useful reminder that users do not always arrive politely through a form.
That year’s projects also included turning Jim Bettencourt’s baseball rules books into a navigable app. Another project, Fall Fest World, made a university club fair into an explorable pixel-art environment. These were different activities with different requirements. A dart score, a disputed rule and a student looking for a club do not need the same solution.
The variety gives substance to Scherba’s interest in building. His role spans strategy, product design and operations, with technical involvement when needed. He is working across the decisions that connect an idea to an experience. The finished screen is one visible result of that work.
Faster tools, familiar questions
Yeti’s experiments with AI development tools brought speed and complications together. Its 2025 hackathon produced prototypes quickly, while the team encountered tangled code, design limitations and the continuing need for experienced developers. Planning the structure before generating the application made the work easier to manage.
That result fits a career spent making things under changing technical conditions. A new tool can shorten an activity without deciding whether the activity is worthwhile. It can generate more options while leaving someone responsible for choosing among them. Faster output gives judgment more material to inspect.
Scherba and Mutter also began hosting The Adventure of Inventing podcast, opening with their own company’s story before bringing other builders into the conversation. The name had already appeared in Yeti’s work, including a 2019 presentation by Scherba. It leaves room for both the appeal of starting and the less predictable experience of continuing.
The next build includes the business
In September 2026, Yeti announced an expanded model combining AI product development, funding and business strategy for founder-owned service businesses. It identified Sulu and ClearDraft as its first two portfolio companies. The intention is to work with people whose existing industries give them a close view of problems worth solving.
Sulu grew from a partnership with GoCar founder Nathan Withrington around creating and managing GPS-guided experiences. ClearDraft brought media lawyers Alex Wade and David Burgess together with software that flags potential legal risks for further review. In each case, specialized experience helps define the job the technology is being asked to do.
The shift extends the responsibility beyond delivering a working product. Yeti is taking on more of the surrounding questions: how a business reaches customers, how it is funded and how it develops over time. Those are the questions that can remain stubbornly open after a satisfying demonstration.
Scherba’s interests outside the company include woodworking and guiding backcountry tours. Both sit comfortably alongside a working life concerned with making things and finding a route. But the business supplies its own continuing project. There is always another joint to examine, another decision about where to go next.
Gotta Go offered a scheduled interruption when someone wanted to leave. Building Yeti has required the opposite commitment: staying with the problem after the appealing first version works. Scherba keeps finding more of the job there.