Hi there! I’m Evan Dancer.

Welcome to my blog where I’ll probably talk about technology and running.

I’ve been running ever since I figured out that, as a 97-pound 7th grader running back, I hadn’t quite hit my stride. Being hit by people much bigger than me wasn’t a fun way to spend my extracurricular time. So, it was cross country for me after that and with that, my running career started. I took running very seriously in high school and ended my senior year placing 14th at states in the 3200m in 9:40.

I tried and failed to make the Michigan cross country team in the fall of 2009. Afterward, I was part of a small, informal JV squad run by Nick Willis that lasted about a semester until I pretty much gave up on running. School and social life were more important.

In 2012, I founded Cribspot with Tim and Jason which started as A2Cribs. We collected all of the rental options (both online and off) and put them all on one map. I still remember launching the website and seeing hundreds of visitors on our site at once in Google Analytics. I was heading to an interview with Square (which I bombed and also met Jack Dorsey). In the back of my mind, I was thinking “this interview doesn’t matter because A2Cribs is going to be big”. We built that first version in PHP and javascript without using any frameworks because we didn’t know any better.

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We wanted to expand A2Cribs and therefore changed the name to Cribspot. We were between Crib-STOP, Crib-SPOT, and Crib-asaurus (which would have a dinosaur mascot obviously). I think we made the right choice. We build a new version of the site in CakePHP and used jquery on the frontend. We were getting better.

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We spent six years going deeper and deeper into off-campus housing from search to lease signing to rent payments and everything in between. We ventured into property management and at our peak, we had about one thousand tenants in our properties. All of whom had signed online leases, made online payments, submitted online maintenance requests, etc. We rebuilt our whole stack too. We were powered by a Ruby on Rails API, Ember applications for tenants, owners, etc, and two React Native apps for tenants and maintenance workers.

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We raised money from investors, joined YCombinator in the W15 batch, and worked day and night to make life better for renters. I led the engineering team.

In 2018, we made the hard decision to shut down, and I joined Apartment List as an Engineering Manager in San Francisco. I worked there for nearly four years until the birth of my daughter.

With the California weather, I’ve slowly gotten back into running targeting marathons. I train daily with my good friend Fernando who happens to live in the same apartment building as me (and is much faster too).

Current Personal Records:

  • 3200m (2009) - 9:40
  • 5k (2008) - 16:28
  • Half Marathon (2021) - 1:13:33
  • Marathon (2021) - 2:42:02