Why I built Roost

Where this started

I'm Jeremy Myrland — current PTO Vice President and incoming President at my child's elementary school in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and I'm involved in several other community organizations. I see what PTOs need to run, and what kind of data trust they need to maintain.

Roost came out of being active in the PTO and hearing the same thing all the time: it's hard to engage with other parents. We all want to. On our own terms. We want to find and be found. We want to know what's important. We want to know how our information is being used. I watched spreadsheets full of family contact info get passed around. I heard directly from parents how hard DirectorySpot was to use. I wanted to build something better.

Handling people's data, carefully

I've spent 15 years as a product manager — building large-scale search platforms at Nike, Apple, and Wayfair, then enterprise HR at Workday, and most recently continuing at Nike on the HR product side. Both consumer search and HR gave me a lot of practice handling information about real people carefully: what to collect, what to display, what to delete, what to never touch in the first place.

Roost is designed privacy-first because that's the right default for a product handling family contact information. It meets GDPR and California's privacy laws structurally — not because either applies at this scale, but because designing toward those bars from day one is cheaper than retrofitting later.

Who's behind Roost

Holdfast Community LLC, which operates Roost, is a Native American-owned business. I'm an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians.