Mike Sukmanowsky

Collaborated on a web analytics platform for media and entertainment companies that produce large volumes of content and experience high traffic volumes. I was an early-stage employee and wore multiple hats, including product management, data engineering, sales, and support, to help build and shape a company that Automattic, the creators of WordPress, eventually acquired.

Acted as the interim CPO for ReturnBear, a reverse logistics company for eCommerce retailers and consumers. This meant developing the company from idea to initial inception and hiring a permanent leadership team.

ReturnBear makes returns easy for customers and retailers and provides software that lets retailers automate return requests and enforce specific rules. It also enables consumers control over how they want to return, including an in-person drop-off option to a participating partner powered by ReturnBear.

At first, I led research efforts with a small design team to understand forward and reverse logistics. Speaking to many experts and retailers, we found returns to be a consistent pain point and created ReturnBear as the solution.

I led the build of the MVP, often creating the first versions of the software and helping to find and work with initial customers to iterate on the first version. Per Koru's model, I helped find the permanent leadership team to run ReturnBear, leading to continued growth and new retailers added.

Developed streamparse, an open source library that lets users run Python code against real-time data streams using Apache Storm. With streamparse, users can create Apache Storm bolts and spouts in Python without writing a single line of Java code. It also provides handy command-line interface utilities for managing Apache Storm clusters and projects.

Built serpextact, an open-source Python library that extracts search keywords from the URLs of search engine results pages. It's particularly useful when analyzing clickstream data that contains URLs that could be from search engines.

Enabled WordPress site owners to easily install Parse.ly to their sites by developing the Parse.ly WordPress plugin. It also allows users to send Parse.ly the appropriate metadata for their content and configure specific settings, including the content that should be ignored.