tenXer

tenXer was a software analytics company founded in 2011 by Jeff Ma, who is also known for his time on the MIT Blackjack Team, which was the basis for the book "Bringing Down the House" and the movie "21". Ma's background in using data and analytics to achieve success in card counting and professional sports consulting informed the core philosophy of tenXer. The company was established with the goal of applying data-driven insights to the world of software development to enhance team productivity.

The San Francisco-based firm developed a productivity analytics tool specifically for software engineering managers. This platform addressed the challenge managers face in tracking the progress of their development teams by aggregating data from existing tools like GitHub, JIRA, and Pivotal Tracker. It provided clear visualizations and pre-built reports that offered insights into what each team member was working on, how long tasks were taking, and which individuals might be encountering difficulties. The service was designed for rapidly scaling companies to help manage their engineering teams effectively. tenXer operated on a business-to-business model, presumably through subscriptions to its cloud-based platform, and had paying customers.

tenXer's product aimed to make engineering teams more efficient and knowledgeable by turning daily work data into actionable statistics for managers. By combining this performance data with social and game-like motivational systems, the platform helped engineers gain insight into their own work habits. The ultimate value proposition was to deliver the necessary insights for managers to make their teams significantly better.

The company's approach to applying analytics to human capital management attracted notable investors, including True Ventures, Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and others, raising approximately $4.7 million over two funding rounds. In April 2015, Twitter acquired tenXer for a sum reported to be under $50 million. Following the acquisition, the tenXer service was discontinued for external customers, and the team was integrated into Twitter to apply their technology internally to improve the social media company's own engineering and developer tools.

Keywords: tenXer, Jeff Ma, software development analytics, engineering management, developer productivity, team performance, GitHub analytics, JIRA insights, Pivotal Tracker data, agile development tools, productivity metrics, engineering intelligence, code analytics, project management insights, sprint retrospective tool, tech team management, acquired by Twitter, human capital analytics, software engineering metrics