Charles Vien - builder. Co-founder of Vortex Games and Branch, now building Applied AI at PostHog.

product engineer @ posthog based in Seattle, WA. Builder. A couple companies in - Vortex Games to a top-10 network, Branch to $14M raised, now building Applied AI at PostHog. Happiest talking to customers and shipping for them in a tight loop.

charles@seattle:~$
charles@seattle:~$cat projects.json# things I have shipped
building2025-now

PostHog

Product Engineer, Applied AI

Building PostHog Code, an agentic coding environment with an autonomy inbox that wires production data into your dev workflow, turning analytics and session replays into prioritized engineering work.

open source
OSS
open source
hackathons nailed
2
hackathons nailed
archived2021-25

Branch

Co-founder & Engineering Lead

Co-founded a game studio and led engineering from day one. I owned the full stack and cloud infrastructure, hired the team and scaled the platform to thousands of concurrent players.

raised
$14M
raised
concurrent users
10k+
concurrent users
eng team
05
eng team
archived2019-23

Vortex Games

Co-founder & CTO · top-10 Minecraft network

Scaled a Minecraft server into a top-10 network worldwide. Built a hot-reload JS-on-JVM framework (24h to <1s deploys), Kubernetes game-server infra and a 50+ KPI analytics pipeline. Colocated our own racks as PoPs around the world, cutting infra cost 80% and latency for players everywhere.

yearly revenue
$1M+
yearly revenue
unique players
3M+
unique players
eng team
03
eng team
archived2012-19

Figuring it out

Self-taught - mods, freelance, first real products

Everything before the companies. I modded Minecraft, freelanced for clients, shipped CMS systems and taught myself how software actually works by building it, selling it and keeping it running.

self-taught
100%
self-taught
earned freelancing
real $
earned freelancing
charles@seattle:~$cat now.md# what I am focused on
  • shipping - PostHog Code, an agentic coding environment that turns product data into engineering work.

  • just shipped - PostHog's Roblox SDK for fun on a 3h car ride from Vancouver, BC to Seattle, WA.

  • learning - Going deep on agentic AI and developer tooling.

last updated Jun 2026 · inspired by nownownow.com
charles@seattle:~$cat about.md# how I got here

It started with Minecraft. I got obsessed with modding servers as a kid, reverse-engineering the server JAR to build a cross-version compatibility layer and writing anti-cheat from raw packet analysis. I taught myself everything as I went and never really stopped.

That turned into Vortex Games, a top-10 Minecraft network worldwide with 3M+ players and $1M+ a year. I rebuilt the infrastructure from the ground up, colocating our own racks as PoPs around the world to cut latency for players everywhere. It taught me how to run something real at scale.

Then I co-founded Branch and led engineering from 0 to 1: a platform for 10k+ concurrent users, an engineering team I grew from 0 to 5 and $14M raised from Homebrew, Dragonfly, Polychain and Coinbase Ventures.

Today I’m a product engineer at PostHog, building PostHog Code: an agentic coding environment that turns product data into shipped work. Bigger systems now, same instinct - find the hard problem and ship the thing that solves it.

charles@seattle:~$ls ./logs# coming soon
coming soon

The silent plague

On the creeping exhaustion of coding with agents all day and the bet we are making in PostHog Code to fix it.