Experience
Founder & CEO | Apollo 21 | Remote
March 2021 - Present
Apollo 21 helps established companies foster innovation from within. We remove barriers to scale by building technology that solves complex operational challenges and by transforming internal ideas into new ventures.
Apollo 21 excels when collaborating with:
Established businesses looking to technology to streamline operations, automate processes, and make data actionable via AI.
Intrapreneurs and businesses who want to leverage new ventures to achieve transformative growth.
Startups who have established product/market fit and are moving beyond “doing things that don’t scale.”
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Advisor | seer | Los Angeles, CA
April 2021 - January 2024
Head of Product
June 2017 - April 2021
By 2021, video is expected to account for 80+% of all internet traffic. That’s not just media and entertainment. Video encompasses personal & corporate security, telemedicine, defense, and more. But video is both expensive and complex to operate at this scale. SEER is building the utility company to power video on the internet. We’ve created an end-to-end solution, designed to simplify video at “80% of the internet” scale.
As one of four founding owners at SEER, I’m responsible for our product and design practices.
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advisor | Boulevard | Los Angeles, CA
May 2017 - Present
The team at Boulevard is building the first customer experience platform for appointment-based businesses. As an advisor, my role is to offer input and insight into product strategy and to contribute to the design efforts around this unique platform.
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Founder, sprint/workshop Designer & moderator | design sprint consultants
August 2017 - April 2021
Design Sprint Consultants was founded as a means to bring Design Sprints, a fast-paced discovery and validation process, to a broader variety of companies. We focus on helping our clients conduct Design Sprints, Immersion Days, and Design Thinking Workshops as a means to develop and test new products & services and big ideas — quickly. Our team specializes in guiding clients through the Design Sprint framework while removing the burden of planning and training for the process. We’re also available to design and conduct Immersion Day and Design Thinking workshops.
I have personally planned and led Design Sprints and Immersion Day sessions for companies including: Jagermeister, Zurich Insurance, Legendary Entertainment, GT Channel, American Express, ThinkStock (a Getty Images company), ImageBrief, and Tauck World Travel. I am an experienced moderator capable of leading a team through the sprint process to solve product, brand, and business problems.
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Product Strategy & Design Consultant | Freelance
2012 - 2021
I work with startups and established companies to develop new products and solve business problems (generally on a project basis). I'm also an experienced Design Sprint moderator/facilitator. Past engagements include:
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Director of Product & Design | Legendary Entertainment | Burbank, CA
December 2016 - July 2017
As part of a small technology “SWAT team,” I led the digital product strategy & design efforts at Legendary Entertainment with a focus on SVOD/AVOD platforms and emerging technologies.
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Head of Product | Tagasauris | New York, NY
August 2014 - August 2016
At Tagasauris, we focused on building an A.I. platform (utilizing computer vision, NLP, machine learning, and human-assisted computation) to generate and document metadata across video content. In essence, doing for video what Google did for HTML pages. Simply put: we taught computers to watch an understand video.
My role at Tagasauris was to lead both our Product Strategy and Product Design practices. I designed applications that gave people an entirely new way to interact with video content. And I worked with our engineering and data science teams to prioritize and manage the development of our core technology platform, strategizing how that platform would come to life, and determining what it could do both for Tagasauris and for our Partners.
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co-founder, CEO | Date Night Is... | New York, NY
February 2013 - January 2016
Our team built Date Night Is... to recommend location-specific, interest-aware date ideas for couples in established relationships. We bootstrapped the product through multiple iterations and grew it into an application used by thousands of couples across NYC and beyond.
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co-creator | I Wanna Nom | New York, NY
January 2011 - January 2013
I Wanna Nom was a side-project that we designed as a "reinvention of the cookbook for the digital space." Capable of saving delicious imagery and the corresponding recipe from any website, the platform allowed users to find recipes, keep them all in one place, and share them quickly & easily. We grew I Wanna Nom to include thousands of users worldwide before Pinterest came along and ate our lunch (pun thoroughly intended).
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Director of Product & Creative Strategy | POKE ny (now makeable) | New York, NY
October 2007 - November 2012
POKE New York (now called Makeable) is a digital innovation consultancy that designs simple, smart, and social products and services. My role focused on leading the team in product design & strategy engagements from initial introduction through concept/ideation, UX and visual design, and oversight of production. I led a variety of projects for clients ranging from newly-minted startups to Fortune 100 companies and globally recognized non-profit organizations to world-renowned publishers and content creators. Some of those projects include:
Product & Installation Design Lead for I Went to MoMA and… (MoMA, NYC).
Strategy & UX Design Lead for If I Can Dream (19 Entertainment).
Product Design Lead, Idea Pantry product line/platform (General Mills/Progresso).
Product & Launch Strategy for AMEX Serve & AMEX Bluebird.
Led global product launch of the Dyson Air Multiplier bladeless fan.
Product Design Lead for the launch of Thinkstock (Getty Images).
Product Design Lead for TruTV.
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Art Director | Merkley+Partners | New York, NY
June 2006 - November 2007
Merkley+Partners is an ad agency with a long history of designing communications for some of the world’s most respected brands. I handled strategic, design, and creative work for:
Mercedes-Benz
Aunt Jemima
Mrs. Butterworth's
Edible Arrangements
The Ad Council
Ferrero Rocher
Arby's
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Editor & founding writer | Beyond Madison Avenue
September 2005 - November 2007
Beyond Madison Avenue was created in September 2005 as an outlet for a few select writers to share their insights on branding and strategy, marketing and advertising, and traditional & innovative media opportunities. I started writing for Beyond Madison Avenue at its inception and served as Editor from September 2006 to November 2007. Regularly ranked among the top 70 media and marketing blogs, under my guidance, BMA grew to include its own podcast, and was voted the Most Valuable Blog ahead of prominent challengers such as Seth Godin and Wired Magazine.
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Freelance Square Peg
2004 - 2006
During my early career, I cut my teeth working for some of the most demanding agencies and interesting client partners I could find. I brought to the table a unique mix of skills and services including: Product Design, Visual Design, Art Direction, Copywriting, and Marketing work. My clients during this period included:
Arsenal Creative (Austin, Texas)
DiMassimo Goldstein (New York, NY)
Toy (New York, NY)
DDB (New York, NY)
Rabbi & Author, Sam Stahl (San Antonio, TX)
Tractenberg Advertising (New York, NY)
Cline, Davis, & Mann (New York, NY)
Undercurrent (New York, NY)
The Museum of American Finance (New York, NY)