I've learned the languages of love, mathematics & HTML, but I most often speak in simplicity. Dream a little dreamier.
Designing technologies that bring people joy, rather than frustration.
Took evening classes while working full-time and starting two companies. I completed my MBA at full speed, taking 2 classes every quarter, for 2.5 years.
I helped build the largest student organization ever at the University of Iowa, started a successful beer-bong business frequented by the Iowa football team (sorry fans!), interned with one of the Big 4 accounting firms, twice, and took graduate level classes while studying for the Actuarial Science professional designation. Go Hawks!
After raising a $1 million seed round of funding, we created a game for your social media activity that rewards you with awesome stuff. We were lucky enough to acquire 50,000 users within 6 weeks of the Beta launch, where users earned over 210 million plyfe points. Below are a few of the things I accomplished.
A marketing, design, and engineering firm. We made websites, web apps, and iPhone apps for ourselves and clients.
For example, we built the Evolyte eCommerce Store in 14 days and with 1 day of marketing, drove 18,000 pageviews and nearly $30,000 in reserved sales.
You can view a sample of some of our work on my Portfolio.
A high-frequency algorithmic trading firm where we developed strategies and technology to trade equities at hyperspeed. We developed the Alpha 2.0 Challenge, which was an open-sourced algorithmic trading contest that allowed the winners to trade their custom-developed algorithm using our capital and cloud computing infrastructure (using AWS in 2007 before the entire internet relied on it).
In the worst market since the Great Depression, our returns were +43% to the market benchmark. I also raised six figures in Angel investment.
Spending years in the Boardroom of the largest companies in the world taught me not only how to convey complex information and data to busy senior executives, but also how to attract, retain, and motivate people using tangible items (e.g., incentive compensation) and intangible items (performance management). Some of the day-to-day duties included project management, business development and presentation, data analysis, report writing, and storytelling.
Clients included Wal-Mart, RadioShack, Energizer, National City, Goldman Sachs, and many other brand name companies.
Beginning as a Sales Associate, I worked my way up through visual merchandising and assistant managing to become the Store Manager in record time. Compared to the previous fiscal year, revenue increased +25% (9th in the company) and Net Income +319% while reducing payroll 14% from budget. The men's department sales rose from 96th to 12th in the company.
I helped turn the business around into one of the Top 3 stores in the company (out of 350), and was subsequently nominated for Store of the Year.
I've been fascinated by the unconscious, emotional drivers of human behavior for years. Have a glance at the presentation below that contains a few tidbits of some of this knowledge.
Marketing is one of those weird things that combines both analytics and psychology. It can simultaneously be one of the most painful yet rewarding processes you go through. But when it works, it really works. An old quote that I really love:
"There are only two functions in any business. You make the product, then you sell the product. Many startups or even Fortune 100 businesses have trouble executing on both.
I've spent years reading and studying scientific research on behavioral decision making and emotional marketing tactics. Here's a taste of some of the more rudimentary tactics:
I taught myself MATLAB in a weekend, took Java in college, taught myself HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I'm currently playing around with Objective C (iOS), just for giggles.
I also made the ridiculously awesome drop-down box you see below. AMAZING!
There's a tremendous difference between intuitive user interfaces and polished Photoshopped designs. I do the former, not the latter. My friends are better than I could ever hope to be at the latter, but I'm getting better every day. Scabadoo.
Whether it's designing Incentive Compensation systems for chief executives of the world's largest companies or mechanics for social game apps, the fundamentals are all the same. It's a mathematical stick and carrot system that begins with cues, makes the user perform some action, and then rewards them for it. And then there's that pesky "fun" thing.
Numbers have been a part of my life since I was a child. My parents still tell the story of me remembering a relative's license plate number and highway marker from weeks prior while on vacation. If you've got millions of rows of data in excel and need to figure out what story it tells, let me take a crack at it. I've done it many times before. Regression's my...middle name.