About Me
This part of the site offers a little more personal insight into who I am, above and beyond Product Management and Product Leadership qualifications which you can find throughout the rest of the site. Professionally, I graduated from UCLA long ago (‘95) summa cum laude, phi beta kappa, with a degree in Psychological Anthropology, which is the study of psychology in a cross-cultural context. It has been and incredibly relevant degree to have in terms of Product Management, because the essence of Product is understanding people - Anthropology gives you the tools you need to look at products from the perspective of the people using them. While that can be intuitive, specific knowledge and skills provided by Anthropology have helped enormously in shaping me into a passionate steward of the user. I look at a product from their point of view and believe that when you really focus on the needs of the user, good things happen to a business.
Working in the Music Industry
I was a very serious student and was accepted to UCLA's PHD program in Psychocultural Anthropology. I spent a year in the program and then made the very difficult decision to move into technology. This was the time of the "birth of the internet" - you would be hard pressed to find someone with more online experience than me as I started during the time of the modem.
My first job was at Sony Music Entertainment for around 7 years. I was hired by Rio Caraeff, who later became the founder, president and CEO of VEVO, the CCO of Magic Leap and a number of other salient positions. Rio was a brilliant individual who was a true joy to work for and taught me an enormous amount. I began as a "web designer", hand coding in HTML, javascript and Adobe's Flash Actionscript (yes, I worked in Flash). I managed an in-house design and development team that built all digital marketing assets for Sony’s roster of artists. We became known within the company as a specialty boutique that was tasked with building websites for Sony's most famous artists: Pearl Jam, Michael Jackson, Incubus, System of a Down, Korn, Neil Diamond, Johnny Cash, Fiona Apple, and a ton of others.
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This job involved working with extraordinarily talented Art Directors spanning a huge range of artistic styles and provided a foundation for art and UI that has served me well throughout my career in the sense that I love working with and deeply respect UI and design teams and the amazing work they do.
Music was one of the first industries to go through digital disruption - and that disruption had a profound impact on the business that is still felt today. First Napster, then Apple Music dramatically effected major label revenues and exposed me to concepts of Digital Rights Management. I started a small start up called the Hamilton Library that was based on Alexander Hamilton's notion of how a public library system should work, applied to music. The idea was that user's would upload their digital copies of a given song and would receive affiliate revenue when others listened to, or "rented" that music. It was a novel idea but could not compete with simpler models that eventually became streaming audio services we have today.
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My experience at Sony also gave me a lot of management experience at a young age. I managed a team of 8-12 web designers and was a key stakeholder in how the team scaled as well as the processes and tools we adopted to manage content and high-volume web development.
Becoming an Entrepreneur
After Sony, I continue to work with the former heads of both Columbia Records (Mark Ghuneim) and Epic Records (Cory Llewelyn). Mark was very active in tech and founded a company called Wiredset, later Trendrr, that was eventually sold to Twitter. Working with Mark and his extraordinary connections at Brew PR - a NYC PR firm - I founded a white-glove Reputation Management company that catered to very high profile clients in the Entertainment and Tech industries. I took on a limited set of clients and helped them improve their social footprint and, in some cases, mitigate issues impacting their search results. This gave me entrepreneurial experience as well as the ability to work with highly demanding clients, which has greatly helped my ability to work with stakeholders in a Product Leader capacity.
Product Management
While learning the ropes of the entrepreneur, the field of Product Management was born. Tech was booming and I became interested in the role, which aligned most closely to what I had been doing at Sony Music. I joined Demand Media (later Leaf Group), a publicly traded Santa Monica-based company whose two most well known brands were eHow.com and LIVESTRONG.COM. At the time I joined Demand, it was in some trouble. Let me explain why.
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Google's algorithm was designed to deliver the best possible results for a given topic. Organic search engine results were the original traffic acquisition source before paid advertising as Google moved into Search Engine Marketing conservatively to protect the integrity of those results. Because so much was at stake in terms of revenue and traffic, it wasn't long before some clever engineers reverse-engineered Google's algorithm and cracked the nut of what caused a page to rank high. This was Demand Media - also known as a "content-farm". The business model consisted of creating "long tail" search query pages at very cost, and at scale. A typical eHow page might be "How to fix a bicycle tire", with 20 different variations - mountain bike, Schwinn bike, etc.
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Google eventually became wise to the manipulation of its algorithm and released the "Panda" update, that penalized pages with duplicate content, a high ad to content ratio, poor content quality, and low engagement signals (time on page, bounce rate, etc.). This update decimated Demand's revenue, which, as a publicly traded company, wasn't good. They stakeholders of the business realized they needed to change the business model and facilitate true, deep, and authentic engagement. For this reason, I was hired. I managed MyPlate - a calorie tracker with a very passionate community and off the chart engagement metrics. My job was to optimize and grow that experience and extend it across the spectrum of LIVESTRONG pages.
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We were very successful at this - by the time I left Demand, LIVESTRONG had surpassed eHow as the highest revenue generating property at the company. We led the first post-IPO redesign of the LIVESTRONG user experience - completely reimagining page structure, content, community and mobile app experiences. It was a great team effort and included many folks I have continued to work with throughout my career.
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Demand had a very high quality engineering team, with extremely high standards of entry. It was a real pleasure to work with the team and again, I remain close to many of the folks I worked with. I learned much about A/B testing, optimization at scale, and SEO. I also became very interested in Mobile Apps, and realized that with mobile migration I needed to become an expert in mobile. I redesigned and refactored the iOS app, and then moved on with a number of other Demand Media veterans to Slickdeals as their Director of Mobile Product.
At Slickdeals, we had another Google challenge: 90 days from my hiring before Google's Mobile Friendly algorithm update would impact search results. Slickdeals was the largest community-driven ecommerce Deal site on the web - basically the "American Idol" of deals, where users would submit and vote up the best deals of the day, and consume as a social feed. They did not have a mobie site at all, and their mobile apps needed both a compelete redesign and code refactoring, including the development of APIs, and significant backend infrastructural work.
Not only did we avert disaster by launching the mobile web site in advance of the mobile web algorithm update, we also substantially improved the mobile app experiences on both iOS and Android. We were able to increase DAUs by 49% and MAUs by 15%, as well as RPU and RPV by over 50%. Some of this was due to the natural phenomenon of mobile migration, but our redesign on mobile was so successful we applied it to desktop and it remains the same design to this day.
From Slickdeals I moved closer to home, from Hollywood to a Santa Monica company, GoodRx (NYSE:GDRX). GoodRx was a Silicon Beach darling, growing exponentially, with a very talented team. I and the rest of the product team worked most closely with Doug Hirsch, the co-founder and co-CEO of the company, to again completely redesign and optimize the experience. One of the bigger wins I had there was a creative use of IP location to deliver localized results to anonymous users, increasing overall revenue by 9%. I was also instrumental in helping shape how the company grew - helping build design, QA, and an expanded product team.
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Beachbody returned me to Health and Fitness. I managed a $9MM product line called BODGroups, which consisted of engagement products - Community, Gamification, Tracking, Chat, Progress, Live Video, and so forth. While at Beachbody, the company IPOed, renamed itself to BODi, and completely redesigned its experience top to bottom. In addition to managing the engagement components of the experience, I also was responsible for the platform experiences, including both iOS and Android apps, as well as the OTT and BODi bike tablet experience. Our OTT and Bike tablet redesigns led the way in the eventual full redesigns of the entire BODi experience. Throughout these significant product changes, BODi was going through larger post-COVID patterns of consumers returning to the physical gym and away from "at home" products like BODi and Peloton. After surviving many rounds of layoffs, I became one myself.
The past year I worked with mindset expert John Assaraf (a best-selling NY Times author and star of The Secret) on developing an app called Innercise. This 0-1 product generated over $2MM and 20K MAUS within its first 6 months of launching, but the companies overall financial difficulties resulted in a dramatic downsizing of the operation. The app included an AI clone of John developed with Delphi.ai and Elevenlabs, the first Delphi integration to use APIs in a native app experience.
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This brings me today, where like many folks in tech, I'm looking for my next product role.
Other Interests
I am an avid musician and play a style of guitar from Hawai'i called Slack Key, or Ki Ho'alu. I am in a band collective called The Wolves Howl, available on all streaming services. We are about to celebrate our 100,000th stream, which is pretty cool. We release a new song once every 6 weeks, and it is a big source of joy and passion for me.
I am also an avid soccer player, playing 3x a week in various games. For many years I played in the LA Premier League - the best 30 and over league in Los Angeles, but one reconstructed knee surgery later I now play pickup with a lot of love.
I am a birder and generally a naturalist that loves the outdoors. I often visit the Channel Islands off of Southern California and both hike and backcountry camp. I have travelled extensively throughout the world and love Pacific Islands, having been to the Hawaiian Islands (Hawai'i, Maui, Oahu, Kuai'i), Tahitian Islands (Bora Bora, Rotorua, Mo'orea, Tahiti). Galapagos Islands, and New Zealand. I have visited India, Thailand, Cambodia, Argentina, Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and extensively throughout Europe (including Belarus!). As a youth I lived in Belgium for a year as an exchange student and speak Flemish fluently.
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I am happily married, and I have a son that is a Freshman at the University of Hawai'i, an avid surfer and airplane pilot.