Sean Everett, Product Manager in Nashville, TN, United States
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Sean Everett

Verified Expert  in Product Management

Growth Product Manager

Location
Nashville, TN, United States
Toptal Member Since
November 21, 2018

With clients including Walmart, AT&T, ESPN, Goldman Sachs, Verizon, Cisco, Discovery, RadioShack, National City, HPE, Fujitsu, and many others, Sean has nearly 20 years of experience working with startups to Fortune 1000 companies on products that include AR, AI, video, blockchain, social, gamification, messaging, and eCommerce for consumers, enterprises, and industrials. He also has an MBA from Chicago Booth and a BS in math and actuarial science.

Project Highlights

AI in Self-driving Robotics
Led the build of PROME, which mapped animal brains and nervous systems into software that enabled adaptable self-driving.
Live and VOD Streaming Video Analytics
Built a streaming video analytics solution from scratch for real-time Live events and historical VOD for OTT, OVP, and MCNs.
Blockchain Transactions in Augmented Reality
Led the first team in the world to successfully complete a blockchain transaction (NEM Assets) in Magic Leap, web, and iOS.

Expertise

Work Experience

Practitioner

2022 - PRESENT
Crosslake Technologies
  • Performing technical due diligence on software companies for private equity acquisition purposes.
  • Reviewing data room materials, speaking with company management, and preparing assessment reports and recommendations to private equity owners.
  • Working with other team members to complete deep-dive, accurate company assessments in very short time periods.

Product Strategy

2021 - PRESENT
Acquicent
  • Built a zero-to-one product for fractionalizing museum-grade collectibles like vintage cars and high-end art and offering them for investment by others.
  • Created the product strategy to capture market demand and compete against other fintech investing products.
  • Wrote the product specifications and managed the design and engineering departments to build it.

Founder | Head of Product

2017 - PRESENT
Everett Advisors
  • Did product work: furniture eCommerce, short-form sports social network, CPG marketplace, baseball hat hardware eCommerce, encryption software, spatial computing protocol, AR hardware, small smartphone, AI for self-driving, a micro-hotel, media.
  • Took projects from an initial idea to a fully realized product by writing the requirements, finding design and development talent, and overseeing the build, release, and automated QA processes.
  • Worked with founders to help them raise capital by boiling down the essence of their business into a standard pitch deck and building a financial model describing their business and potential investor returns.
  • Developed a realistic go-to-market plan that incorporated ten times cheaper customer acquisition channels and executed it.
  • Crafted real-world, location-based experiential activations for some of the biggest brands in the world.

Head of Product Management

2021 - 2022
Gembah Inc
  • Build the global marketplace from scratch, connecting industrial engineers, electrical and mechanical engineers, supply chain, logistics, manufacturing experts, and a worldwide vendor ecosystem.
  • Hired a high-performing, senior product management team in a few weeks.
  • Helped productize a highly fragmented industry to accelerate sales cycles from weeks to minutes.

Chief Operating Officer | Product Development

2019 - 2022
Icarus Lived, Inc. / Goodpoint
  • Built the product from prototype to MVP beta launch to v1 production release at Mygoodpoint.com.
  • Recruited and hired senior engineers to build in-house engineering, QA, and content teams that built the product from scratch.
  • Improved the app performance and usability while moving from a monolithic to microservices, test-driven development, and continuous deployment environment (LAMP to a MERN stack).
  • Created financial models and market comparisons for P&L, MAUs, and valuation for fundraising purposes.
  • Developed content and content strategy along with product requirements and roadmaps.
  • Developed and managed high-quality documentation, agile Kanban development, continuous-release processes, and operational protocols.

VP Product Management

2021 - 2021
Q.ai
  • Grew the North Star Metric (Assets Under Management) by nearly +50% every month by shipping major features, new consumer investment options, and new growth hypothesis tests every two weeks.
  • Increased retention to 95% and DAU/MAU stickiness to 80% by releasing themed “AI-Guided Investment Kits”.
  • Navigated the product from MVP to a v2 competitive mobile investing app.

Group Product Manager

2021 - 2021
Angi
  • Tripled the purchase conversion rate by showing Roofing, Painting, Fencing offers as monthly prices.
  • Read every user research report for the prior two years, then invented an “Interactive Invoice” experience where marketplace matching and messaging occurred prior to checkout to increase conversion rates.
  • Created a simplified KPI analytics dashboard for weekly reporting of Presentations, GMV, AOV, Take Rate, Revenue by Major Category, Division, and Group that allowed easier management from the CEO down to individual contributors.
  • Built a prototype product for the key Roofing category which doubled conversion rates.

Founder | Chief Product Officer

2011 - 2020
PROME, Inc.
  • Successfully mapped every neural connection in multiple animal brains and nervous systems to a dynamic software model then used to drive a robotic rover in real-time.
  • Won the "Best AI in Robotics" Award and was invited (out of 1,000 startups) to join the Plug & Play Mobility and IoT batch in Silicon Valley.
  • Created inbound interest with global F1000 companies, including Ford, BASF, Fujitsu, Goodyear, Hewlett-Packard, Lufthansa, and Rolls-Royce.

Director of Product Marketing

2018 - 2018
VERSES Foundation
  • Built the spatial web protocol and consumer/enterprise ÐApps.
  • Designed the security token offering, including financial valuations, projections, and company pitch decks.
  • Established the customer requirements for the development team to build a blockchain-verified AR transaction system (smart assets, smart spaces, smart contracts, next-gen 4D browsers across iOS 12, Magic Leap, and WebGL).
  • Wrote and developed the aspects of the technical whitepaper and gamified the tokenomics system.
  • Established a go-to-market focus for supply chains such as warehouse pick & pack and Amazon Go-like retail shopping.
  • Got MOUs signed from Devvio, NCoded, Telexistence, Path Network, Symbioses, Shadow Factory, and PROME.
  • Worked with the OpenAR Cloud team to get the organization off the ground.

Vice President of Business Development

2017 - 2018
RealWear, Inc.
  • Generated a third of the company’s Q1 2018 revenue through channels and ISVs, more than 50% increase quarter on quarter.
  • Expanded the ISVs developing on the RealWear platform three-fold in three months, from 10 to 36 partners.
  • Oversaw the biggest deals in the AR industry: Verizon, Honeywell, Cisco, Fujitsu, AT&T, Skanska, HPE, and ABB.
  • Created money per user per month (MRR) for the Remote Expert hardware and software bundle with automated inbound lead generation.

Founder | Chief Product Officer

2011 - 2018
Humanizing Tech
  • Founded a media publication growing 10% weekly, covering emerging tech, and predicting future trends in the industry from a product management perspective. It was recently acquired by the Mission, the largest, fastest-growing publication on Medium.
  • Led the operations of a platform that has generated over 800 analyses. Two years later, these analyses have ranged from biologic intelligence, personal hedge fund, editable DNA, superhuman augmentation, video as an app, and SaaS space platforms.
  • Acted as the top writer on Medium for these categories: space, virtual reality, health, fashion, technology, science, finance, investing, self-driving, psychology, social media, transportation, venture capital, business, and biologic intelligence.

Entrepreneur in Residence

2017 - 2017
The Mission, Inc.
  • Wrote for the fastest growing and largest publication on Medium, beating the Economist and the Washington Post with millions of viewers every month.
  • Authored the first podcast series on female entrepreneurs, which is currently live on Apple and other podcast platforms, which helped sell a Salesforce sponsorship.
  • Acquired the original media publication, Humanizing Tech.

Vice President of Product & Business Development

2013 - 2017
Piksel, Inc.
  • Oversaw enterprise-grade SaaS online video products with hundreds of customers in America, the UK, Germany, Italy, and resellers in LATAM and Japan.
  • Built a video analytics platform from the ground up for real-time live streaming historical VOD across a number of demographic and viewership metrics while maintaining operations of two other platforms.
  • Developed live-streaming and on-demand video products (white-label web console and players, Android/iOS mobile apps, Roku apps, Sony T2 Playstation app, ads and payments/offers, LPO scheduler & EPG, UGC, analytics, streaming faith site, MCN portal.
  • Scaled the site to 375 million monthly views, more than 4 million monthly video minutes, and a streaming faith of 1.2 million monthly uniques.
  • Reduced the error rate on a decade-old LAMP stack from 10% to 0.1%, increased the uptime from 99% to nearly 99.99% for a ground-up redesign & rebuild of a console, transcoding, HTML5 players, and real-time analytics.
  • Fostered innovation for a live-streaming app for events, an MCN portal for Endemol, a personalized channel, and a media library.
  • Reported to the CEO and wrote direct reports (for engineering, product management, docs/translation) and indirect reports for QA, UX, support, sales, legal, and HR (Solana Beach, Atlanta, New York, London, York, Malaga).
  • Patented the personalized channel (No. 62/073,785) and 19 others for mobile live-streaming videos in a connected car.
  • Acted as a thought leader and was selected to represent consumer/enterprise video products for our $100 million global company.
  • Flew 150,000 miles globally in 18 months to do whatever it took to turn around the product.

Founder | Chief Product Officer

2013 - 2014
SuperKind LLC
  • Created a private equity group that scales traditionally unscalable businesses by adding technology, entertainment, and marketing partnerships to our portfolio companies.
  • Created a private equity purchase buyout opportunity of a multi-location, boutique gym chain in the Dallas metroplex.
  • Analyzed 37 historical financial statements and prepared a 70-page private equity purchase prospectus outlining the business valuation, purchase price, marketing strategy, incentive compensation plan, and external fitness and medical partnerships to supercharge revenue.
  • Established SuperKind as the exclusive American marketing and distribution partner for Anil Arjandas luxury Spanish jewelry line (Anilarjandas.com), including negotiating celebrity endorsement by Lilly Ghalichi of Bravo's The Shahs of Sunset fame.

Founder | Chief Product Officer

2012 - 2013
Adam & Luna LLC
  • Launched the StoryApp from an inkling of an idea to the App Store without any angel or venture capital and with an entirely remote team.
  • Recruited a world-class team: an Ice Age story artist, a Disney concept artist, a Badgeville engineer, and a US Air Force Cyber Security engineer.
  • Partnered with Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab Senior Fellow, and as one of the ten global companies partnered with Beyond Verbal, an Israeli intelligent emotion analysis company.
  • Sold six-figure deals in design and engineering agency work to fund the team’s compensation.
  • Developed HR cultural and performance management document, managed all accounting and legal contracts, controlled business expenses under $200 per month.
  • Functioned, as acting the CTO, building product roadmap, specs, daily standups, scrum, and weekly sprints, all while training as a product apprentice.
  • Engineered seven major versions of the website, including a Ruby on Rails app to collect user signups complete with transactional emails.
  • Engineered StoryApp’s first character animations in Objective-C.
  • Compiled, analyzed, and shared daily product analytics and implications with the entire team.
  • Managed the media relations across multiple publications including Pando Daily, Dallas Morning News, and DFW Startups.

Head of Product

2011 - 2012
PLYFE, Inc.
  • Transitioned an alpha product to a consumer-ready web application.
  • Grew it from 50,000 users, one month after beta launch, in total earning nearly 210 million points.
  • Oversaw the creative side, branding, UI/UX, game mechanics, analytics, social media, mobile exploration, product roadmap, point calibration, recruiting, sprint planning, and the relationships between design, engineering, and marketing.

Founder | Chief Product Officer

2009 - 2011
Evolyte, LLC
  • Worked for Creative and Code agency which works for Fortune 10 companies and some of the top talent, creative, and sports management agencies.
  • Created A/B tested pricing models (in-app purchase vs paid download) across multiple iPhone app launches.
  • Built a daily-deals store selling iPads on sale over the Christmas holiday resulting in $30,000 revenue in one month with zero marketing budget.
  • Developed Confide, an app for sharing anonymous thoughts online.
  • Constructed search engine optimization backlinks and onsite performance increases for clients.
  • Designed decks, ads, apps, and print materials for clients.

Founder | Chief Product Officer

2007 - 2010
BlueStone Investments, LLC
  • Developed high-frequency trading algorithms for use in real-time equity investing.
  • Worked with premiere financial engineering academic institutions and let them test their algorithms with our capital.
  • Generated a greater than 43% return to the market benchmark during the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Management Consultant

2005 - 2010
Willis Towers Watson, Inc.
  • Won the Chairman's Award for Excellence out of 10,000 employees for exemplary quality work and client relationships.
  • Worked for notable clients including AT&T, Walmart, Goldman Sachs, Celanese, Citizens Republic Bancorp, National City, and The Container Store.
  • Managed executive compensation by conducting competitive assessments (executive market pricing for the base, bonus, LTI, perquisites, and benefits).
  • Designed incentive plans (annual + long-term) including performance metrics and goal setting, pay-for-performance analysis, 280G calculations, peer group compilations, proposal writing, billing/AR/project management, and new hire analyst training.
  • Executed broad-based compensation by implementing competitive assessments (non-exempt and exempt positions for the base and total cash), building structures, leveling guidelines, custom surveys.
  • Acted as one of three leaders for the Breakfast Club.
  • Developed and implemented an associate development program to jumpstart high potential associate engagement and opportunities within the organization.
  • Engaged and motivated the employees by opening communication channels between lines of business.

AI in Self-driving Robotics

https://prome.ai

Led the build of PROME, which mapped animal brains and nervous systems into software that enabled adaptable self-driving.

It uses animal connectomes (i.e., brain and nervous system of animals) instead of deep learning for real-time decision-making and control that can also adapt to black swan events without prior training data.

Live and VOD Streaming Video Analytics

https://developer.pikselpalette.com

Built a streaming video analytics solution from scratch for real-time Live events and historical VOD for OTT, OVP, and MCNs.

For this project, I worked with engineering teams in the US (Georgia), England, and Italy, and a UX design team in California to conceptualize, design, develop, and release a scalable video analytics solution using a containerized microservices approach on top of AWS.

It's now running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year for all its customers worldwide.

Blockchain Transactions in Augmented Reality

https://youtu.be/yy0BxGQAqsM

Led the first team in the world to successfully complete a blockchain transaction (NEM Assets) in Magic Leap, web, and iOS.

I worked with former Microsoft and Unity engineers to create Amazon Go-like augmented reality digital twins for blockchain-based transactions in retail and pick-and-pack scenarios, using an off-the-shelf iPhone and iOS 12.

Private Equity Operational Model

Built a monthly operational model in excel linking orders, OPEX, CAPEX, debt, and DCF through to 5-year financial statements.

I made an easy-to-use operational model with the following tabs, in the order of entry:
1. Assumptions.
3. Revenue and cash flow timing.
4. Payroll.
5. Operating expenses.
6. Detailed statements.
7. Summary statements.
8. Discounted cash flow.

CPG Financial Model

Created a highly complex operating financial model for a California-based CPG expanding into other states.

I produced five major versions for internal use and investor diligence with the following features:
• Three-year monthly data with quarterly and annual roll-ups
• Assumptions
• SKU-based order packages by three tiers
• Wholesale orders by state, with a six-month ramp of dispensaries being signed up
• Inventory management with yields by product SKU and associated cash-flow timing
• Fully loaded compensation expenses
• OPEX expenses organized by company departments and cost caps based on budgets by department
• Financial statements that are broken down by product families, departments, and state
• Budgets versus historical actuals
• KPIs and achievement levels
• Unit economics by product and state
• Discounted cash flow valuation
• Production process timelines

Voice & Video Sharing App with AI

https://adamluna.quora.com

Built an app that lets users record their voice over photos and creates a shareable video with animated AI emoticons.

StoryApp is a social media mobile app that combined voice, photo and video sharing, emotion AI detection from voice, and animated emoticons back in 2012 before voice, AI, animojies, stories, and AR all hit the mainstream.

Daily Deals Store

Sold $30,000 worth of product in one month with zero marketing budget.

I built the Evolyte Store which sold Apple iPads at a discount if enough products were purchased; it included viral sharing options to get the word out.

It was picked up by multiple Apple blogs over a recent holiday season.

Tripled Purchase Conversion Rates – Global Marketplace

https://www.angi.com

Working with the team, we discovered a way to triple purchase conversion rates for consumers purchasing high-priced services over the internet (e.g., $15,000 to $50,000).

Managed the highly complex, strategic divisions of Angi, Home Advisor, and Handy's home improvement marketplace and was responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in GMV. This included interior and exterior painting, roofing, fencing, and additions and remodels.
2008 - 2011

Master of Business Administration (MBA) Degree in Finance & Economics

University of Chicago Booth School of Business - Chicago, IL, USA

1999 - 2003

Bachelor of Science Degree in Mathematics and Actuarial Science

University of Iowa - Iowa City, IA, USA

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