It’s rare in life that one gets to spend a decade with someone else; this is often reserved for partners, family members, and best friends. I’ve had the honor and privilege to work with Stuart Runyan for over 10 years now, and it's a thing to celebrate. This blog post honors Stuart as an employee, co-working peer, and friend.

April 29, 2015. From left: Andy Fleming, Randy Apuzzo, Gerry Widmer, Stuart Runyan

Humble Beginnings: The First Engineering Hire

Stuart was Zesty.io  Platform, Inc.’s first engineering hire on April 29 in 2015. At the time, the team was Randy Apuzzo, Gerry Widmer, Andy Fleming, and Dustin Horning. Stuart joined Zesty from the local successful San Diego startup Tealium(a product we commonly implement for Zesty customers), before Tealium Stuart was previously at Business Online. Stuart would commonly run in the Zesty co-founders during numerous tech talks and startup San Diego tech events we would host at the 6th avenue office. Stuart was there when we were raising our first angel funding, and living through the day to day challenges of startup life, traveled for Trade shows, participated in Tech Foosball, and was there for onboarding our first major brand, Sony. Technically he was intimately involved with the UI and progression of the Zesty CMS Manager UI influencing it through the year to where it is now.

Apr 11, 2017, Zesty.io  Codechella in Palm Springs. From left: Stuart Runyan, Andy Fleming

The Path to Leadership: VP of Engineering

Through the years, Stuart was with the company through the onboarding of multiple publicly traded brands, privately traded companies, the onboarding of Rocket League, and many others. Each step we took required the technology to be quickly updated to support the needs. In October 2017, Andy Fleming transitioned away from the company, leaving the company with a sharded technical leadership, myself (Randy Apuzzo) between CEO and CTO, needed additional techinical leadership.  Within a years time, Stuart stepped into the roles and started participating in high-level technical decisions and became a key implementer beyond frontend UI work. 

San Diego Gulls games with Team. From top left: Gerry Widmer, Andy Fleming, Angie Taylor, Dustin Horning, Chloe Spilotro, Randy Apuzzo, Stuart Runyan

Thirst for Knowledge: A Relentless Learner Questioning Everything

Stuart’s boundless curiosity has been a cornerstone of his impact at Zesty. He approaches every challenge with an insatiable desire to understand not just how things work, but why they work that way. His questions may feel like disruptive roadblocks (especially coming from the CEO pushing sales driven features), but they aren’t—they’re catalysts that spark better ideas, sharper thinking, and smarter solutions. This relentless pursuit of clarity and improvement has elevated not only the product, but the entire engineering culture around him.

Apr 11, 2025, Google Cloud Next in Vegas, From Left: Stuart Runyan, Gisele Blair 

An Architect of Implementation: From Ideas to Execution

Stuart has always had a gift for unraveling complexity and transforming it into elegant, scalable solutions. When faced with thorny architectural challenges or new business demands, he doesn’t flinch—he listens, models, simplifies, and builds. His implementations aren’t just functional; they set the standard for how we write code, structure systems, and think about long-term maintainability. Stuart was instrumental in our platform migration efforts, making difficult transitions smooth and seamless for our customers. He also led the charge in overhauling our CI/CD pipeline, dramatically improving deployment speed and stability, and played a critical role in enhancing our overall system performance—often finding clever, deeply technical ways to unlock efficiencies that had long been bottlenecks. These aren’t one-off wins; they’ve become the foundation of how Zesty.io operates today.

Feb 1st, 2024 The Salvation Army HQ. From Left: Todd Sabo, Randy Apuzzo, Stuart Runyan

Evolving Identity: From Engineer to Engineering Leader

Stuart wasn’t hired as an engineering leader, or manager, but he took to the role as we grew from a few developers to over a dozen. He took on the management position (while still personally contributing) with a focus on growing individuals and making them self starters. Hundreds of interviews and 40+ hires laters, Stuart grew as a leader, from not just having the VP Engineering title, but owning it. Transition from an individual contributor to a management role, while still having IC demands from leadership, is extremely difficult and Stuart handles this like a true champion, a solid rock.

Today: Zesty.io’s CTO and Co-Founder

I’m proud to announce Stuart Runyan as CTO of Zesty.ioPlatform, Inc. as Stuart has shaped product vision, technical roadmap and implementation, and company culture to date. More importantly, due to a decade of dedication, loyalty, brilliance, vision, influence, and being a solid reliable peer for both our team members and customers, the title of Zesty.ioco-founder. The company could only be so lucky to have you involved over these past ten years. We are all excited to have you as co-founder, and it's well deserved.

A few for the memory books!

March 11, 2016, Zesty.ioCodechella in Idyllwild. From left: Stuart Runyan, Randy Apuzzo

Oct 26, 2021, Zesty.iooffice Acoustic Sessions in San Diego, From Left: Dominic Tarantino (RIP 1977-2023), Stuart Runyan, Randy Apuzzo

2018, Zesty.iooffice Stu overlooks chair development, From Left:  Stuart Runyan, Chloe Spilotro, Kim Koga, Grant Glidewell, Ashley Leslie, Gerry Widmer, Dustin Horning