Entrepreneur
I have been involved with a number of companies and projects over the years.
Here are the highlights and key takeaways (reverse chronological order).
Uber
Role: Head of Product - Uber Developer Platform
The vision of the Uber Developer Platform was to take Uber beyond a consumer facing ride-sharing network to a powerful logistics layer for the Internet. We were to build the platform for moving people and things in the real world with the cars acting as packets on a giant real-world packet switch network. The next “Uber for X” was to be powered by Uber and the innovation and ingenuity of a world-wide ecosystem of indie developers.
Key Details
Early employee
Built a team and suite of products to enable developers to innovate with, on and around Uber.
Defined and articulated the vision + mission + policies
Developed the “Uber Developers” and “Build Moving Experiences” brands
Grew the team from ~10 to ~30
Provided Product and Strategy support to the Biz Dev team for Strategic partnerships and Ecosystem development
Advocated for open, transparent, high-empathy developer engagement
Expanded the product surface area from 1 Ride Request API to a range of developer products including Ride Request Button, Trip Experiences API, Ride Request Widget, Mobile SDKs, UberRUSH APIs, Driver API, Self-serve analytics, Developer Documentation v2
Key Announcements/Media Coverage
Echo
Role: Co-founder and Chief Product Officer
Echo built a series of powerful cloud services designed to power real-time, social experiences for brands and media companies. On-top-of this stack we built an ecosystem of widget developers (comments, news feeds, social walls, social TV etc etc) and the The Echo Experience Studio - the worlds first drag-n-drop authoring environment to aggregate, curate and showcase social media content into beautiful, real-time sites or widgets. It touched tens of millions of consumers though some of the biggest brands and media companies in the world. They used it for brand marketing, breaking news coverage, events and more.
Key Details
Defined and drove a powerful and differentiated product vision in a crowded and well funded space.
Worked at the highest levels with CNN, Univision, NASDQ, Disney, UMG, NBCU, Coke, Fanta, AT&T and more to craft beautiful, consumer facing products at the intersection of social and mainstream media
Grew the platform from 0 to 85 Billion API calls a month.
Grew and managed a team of 30
Powered key social and community features on most of the top media companies in the US and some of the biggest brands (comments, media walls, social TV, forums, news feeds etc).
Related Media
Key Announcements/Media Coverage
DataPortability Project
Role: Co-founder and Chairman
The DataPortability Project posited that "Standardized Data Portability is the next great frontier for the web. As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data."
The DataPortability project was founded to drive the narrative about how Open Standards create a truly open, connected and interoperable world and was arguably responsible for spurring or accelerating the development and commercialization of technologies like Facebook Connect, OAuth, Portable Contacts, OpenID Connect and more.
Key Details
In a series of big announcements, major stakeholders like Facebook, Myspace, Microsoft, Google and others joined the workgroup as the primary forum to work on the issue.
I gave a series of keynote speeches and wrote a series of key blog posts on the subject becoming a subject matter expert
The project coined and popularized the phrase "data portability", lead an explosion of conversation about open standards and interoperability throughout 2007 and 2008 influenced the development of technologies like Facebook Connect, OAuth and Google Takeout.
I also led a separate effort to develop a specific open standard called Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML) that allowed users to encapsulate and port their personalization/attention profile from app to app.
The term and the concept is now part of the European GDPR Law with companies all around the world forced, by law, to adopt some form of portable data policy and features.
Key Announcements/Media Coverage
Faraday Media
Role: Co-founder and CEO
Faraday Media was focused on developing tools that measured and filtered Attention.
Our primary product was Particls; A consumer app designed as an all-purpose heads-up-display for your life. it learned what you cared about and delivered information to you while you work. The result could take many forms including a news crawler, pop-up toast alerts, SMS, email digests, flash visualizations etc.
My role included shaping the business, leading product strategy, design, prioritization and even some hands on engineering. I also lead content marketing, product marketing and cause marketing efforts that ultimately lead to the development of APML and DataPortability Project.
Key Details
Lauded by the tech media of the time, Particls was amongst the first to present RSS/News as a persistent desktop reverse-chronological stream (vs. Folders and Unread items) preempting the now commonplace 'Twitter Mac Client' and Facebook news feed style stream of updates.
Exigent Studios
Role: Founder and CEO
We created business models around simple, elegant web-based software that help communities create and extract value from their shared contributions and experiences. We worked with local governments, industry associations and radio stations to transform their passive subscribers/customers into an active community - using powerful web products developed in-house.
I set the vision & strategy for the company as well as the design and management of our web-based products.
Key Details
Developed one of the first web-based CRM systems “Inflexion” the same year that Salesforce was founded - developed at a time when the idea that commercial, sophisticated software would be delivered as a “service” via the browser was entirely unheard of
Developed powerful message delivery tools that allowed companies to write a message once, and have it delivered to each customer using their preferred channel - snail mail, email, sms etc.
Developed sophisticated enterprise blogging tools “Pandora” allowing departments to break their newsletters into discrete, regular updates at a time before the term blogging was well known or understood
Customers included city councils, major schools, major industry associations and radio shows
Radioactive
Role: Founder, Host and Project Lead
Radioactive was about turning radio into a real-time conversation with a community. With a live radio show broadcast on terrestrial radio and the internet every week, the show blurred the lines between chat, forums, voting and radio to create a presentation that was by the community and for the community.
I founded the project, designed the show and managed a team of over 20 volunteers around the country to broadcast a new show each week.
I also led the design and development of a community platform that included blogging, forums, comments, UGC submissions and publishing workflows for a geographically dispersed team of volunteers.
Key Details
Radioactive was amongst the first Internet Radio Projects in the world
It went far beyond radio, however, pioneering many of the techniques that are now common place with Social TV , Facebook Live and other forms of interactive live content
We pulled together a team of young volunteers across Australia and orchestrated their efforts using custom software to produce a highly-produced radio show each and every week