Employee Spotlight: Meet Max!

Quick Facts

Meet Max Trautner, our in-house design extraordinaire!

Max brings 15 years of expertise with all things UX & digital media. He works closely with our customers every day to ensure all content created through Gatsby has a professional design agency feel, without the price tag.

• Hometown - San Antonio, Texas 🤠  

• Favorite Drink - Whiskey.

• Favorite Color - Black.

• Favorite Hobby - Gardening.

• Most Under-Utilized Gatsby Feature? "Videos on the landing page."

• If you had one piece of advice for customers, what would it be? “Create a test event and invite your team to a fictional event.”

Max's Story

1. Why did you join Gatsby? 

Max Trautner: “Gatsby approached me actually. I'd wanted to work in a tech company for a while and had been agency-side for so long working for clients that it was really hard to break into an in-house role. I think in-house teams are wary of agency designers in some respects because we've been used to context switching a lot and it's hard to kind of focus on one stream of thought or…one company for a while. So it was kind of Kismet*. 

*Note: Kismet means fate or destiny (Don’t worry, the interviewer had to look it up too)

2. What is your favorite thing about working with Gatsby customers? 

Max Trautner: “It's a high stakes environment. These are really valuable relationships to these people, and the events are a big deal, so a lot of care and attention is taken to everything. Events are exciting, and they can be really stressful, but there's something really nice about people caring so much - there's an attention to the details, and focus on doing things that work and that matter for these firms.”

3. What is your favorite thing about the Gatsby culture & your teammates?

Max Trautner: “That's a hard question. I think everybody kind of has that same mentality that our customers do. We understand that it's also high stakes on their end, nobody's taking it lightly. Everybody at Gatsby is really involved in it and really cares.” 

4. What would you say is unique about Gatsby?

Max Trautner: “I think it's a certain event caliber. To me, to do events of this caliber, you would have to have hired a web designer who would create you a nice web registration site and you'd have to use Mailchimp or go around all of your boss's emails and send email out of that person. There is a certain caliber of event that you can do on Gatsby that you can't do on our direct competitors or you have to spend way more money to do it.”

5. When was the last time you laughed really hard?

Max Trautner: “Yesterday! It was something absurd my four-year-old said.” 🥹