Current Work
Charlie is changing the banking landscape for a generation of retiring Americans by delivering financial flexibility and transparency, best-in-class fraud protection and extraordinary customer support. This is wrapped in a respectful, responsive UX that helps retirees spend wisely, avoid scams, and pursue their retirement journey with confidence.
Beyond the core banking application, I pioneered the development of FraudShield: Charlie's groundbreaking real-time protection suite. Charlie is the first bank to design intelligent friction into funds flow. Features like SpeedBump - which pauses suspicious transactions for six hours, giving customers a handy "Undo" button if they realize they’ve been scammed - saved our customers over $1mm of their hard-earned savings in the first year of launch.
With new tools like Sora 2, deepfake videos are easier than ever to create and harder than ever to detect. I developed a tool that uses the same AI technology to help you warn your parents and loved ones about deepfake scams before a real one hits. In one minute you can create a personalized video with your loved one’s name and hometown.
It’s a safe, powerful way to demonstrate just how convincing these scams can be, and spark a critical conversation about fraud and financial safety.
I wrote and illustrated a conversation guide that empowers the adult children of retired Americans to broach one of the most sensitive and difficult conversations: financial fraud. By creating a neutral safe space, Family FraudShield allows family members to tackle the hardest topics in a structured, collaborative way.
Convincing customers to switch their banks is hard, particularly if customers have been loyal to their banks for decades. To earn customer trust, Charlie had to start by saving them money before they sign up. CharlieSaver is a senior discount platform helping older adults find verified, local savings. At launch, CharlieSaver became the most comprehensive senior discount database on Earth, allowing users to live a “sales-tax-free life” across a wide set of essential and discretionary spending categories.
Past Work
As Executive Director and then VP of Product, I founded the Audience Development group, hired a team, and helped increase Monthly Unique Visitors from 48.5M in Jan 2013 to 75M in Jan 2016, after years of stagnant growth. This required making deep inroads with the CEO, the Publisher, and most importantly, Editor-in-Chief Dean Baquet. Kind words from Dean: “The guy just comes down here, fit right in and blew our socks off! I don’t need to tell you how rare that is.”
The New York Times
As GM and P&L owner of IMDb, I accelerated revenue growth to keep up with Amazon’s exploding ad business by modernizing our ad stack, targeting, and video offerings. I deepened our partnerships with Film and Television studios with IMDb Insights, a groundbreaking predictive analytics tool that gave marketers crucial insights into their prospective audiences well before launch. Oh and we launched a boat.
Amazon / IMDb
In the throes of COVID-19, I built a skunkworks team within the largest privately-held healthcare startup ($950M raised), and we developed “Sidekick,” a machine-learning digital assistant for onsite healthcare workers. Sidekick accelerated workflows and surfaced relevant, contextual data to help frontline workers do their jobs. In the first year, it became Olive’s highest-grossing product offering. MemorialCare Executive Director Tara Chavez wrote: “Together, we built and implemented a product that was life-changing at our Navigation Center for both patient experience and employee productivity.”
Olive AI
Teaching and Speaking
My wife and I developed a new curriculum for how to teach cultural literacy in a data-driven way. We’ve had the great privilege of teaching a class based on this curriculum at The Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA for the last three years. The class empowers students to examine music through the lens of influences: other artists and music; historical events; geography; recording technology and distribution; and law and copyright. These tools allow students to critically hear music with a deeper level of comprehension and appreciation.
UCLA - Culture Flow
Interviewing legendary producer Tony Berg (Beck, Sarah Mclachlan, Phoebe Bridgers)
Get in touch
I’m open to advisory or speaking engagements. Or just happy to answer your questions about product development. Look forward to hearing from you!