Schulich School of Business - York University

Western University

audentes Fortuna iuvat

In charge of all operations and things geek at THE OPEN:MINDS EXPO, a psychedelic information and discovery platform.

The Open:Minds Expo

Responsible for the technical and product management of  Lift&Co.'s platform, including consumer facing content and product review sites as well as Cohesion, Lift&Co.'s DaaS platform for cannabis market data collection and dissemination.  Managed an international team including product managers, software developers, data scientists and QA professionals.

Lift & Co. Expo

The Entrepreneurship Hatchery, University of Toronto, Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering

Mentor

Extreme Innovations works with corporations and senior executives build their top line revenues by leveraging new technology platforms.  We bring together ideas, people and technology to build great products and businesses.   Extreme combines experience in business formation, software development, user research, and design thinking to deliver tailored innovation solutions help clients across a broad spectrum of industries.

A portfolio company of Extreme Venture Partners, one of the most successful early stage technology investors in Canada,  Extreme' skill set is in building complex software (mobile/desktop) applications across a range of industries (Home security, health care, finance, music)  and technologies (IoT, hardware mobile video and chat, payments, digital currencies).

Extreme Innovations

Managing Partner

Responsible for the end to end design and development of r/ally, a machine learning based SaaS platform that aggregates data from numerous internal and external data sources in order to identify  subject matter experts within large organizations.

What differentiates r/ally from other products on the market is that:
1. It functions via knowledge extraction.  This involves the creation of knowledge from structured  and unstructured  sources in a manner that facilitates inferencing in order to figure out “Who knows what?” across a large organization.  
2. Out of the box, r/ally's knowledge extraction is automated and cross-domain.   r/ally's domain specificity can also be augmented as required.
3. It is capable of handling the uncertainty traditionally associated with knowledge management.   
4. Relies on machine learning versus taxonomies. Other engines often have only a fixed set of rules or manual in-house taxonomies, while r/ally uses modern machine learning algorithms, such as random forests, to automatically detect and disambiguate potential skills. 

I wrote the functional specifications, assembled the development team and managed front end (Javascript/Titanium/JavaScript/HTML5) and back end (Python/PostgreSQL/Redis/AWS) development of the mobile and desktop product suite from inception to launch using a remote, international development team.

r/ally

VP of Product

Responsible for defining and building a highly engaging social media marketing platform in the console gaming space.....and generating a bit of media attention.  I drove Waygoz's cost of user acquisition to less than 55% of industry averages and increased user engagement rates by 27% as measured by return visits and time in application.

If hell is administrated by game publishing executives, I’m sure they’re saving especially hot seats for the folks who founded Waygoz, a clever new in-person, peer-to-peer game trading service that just started a beta program in downtown Toronto. 
 - Chad Sapieha - The Globe And Mail

Waygoz.com on Mashable - http://mashable.com/2012/04/05/waygoz-social-network-games/
Waygoz.com on IGN - http://games.ign.com/articles/122/1222584p1.html
Waygoz.com on LazyGamer.net - http://www.lazygamer.net/general-news/say-hello-to-waygoz-the-social-network-of-trading-used-games/
Waygoz.com on CTV News - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxfLoZnpUCg
Waygoz.com in the Globe and Mail - http://bit.ly/t6hOfG
Waygoz.com on TheGameEffect - http://www.thegameeffect.com/news/waygoz-threatens-to-marginalize-gamestop-other-used-retailers
Waygoz.com on ForeverGeek - http://www.forevergeek.com/2012/04/waygoz-the-future-of-game-swapping/
Waygoz com on GamerLimit - http://gamerlimit.com/2012/04/waygoz-a-new-game-swapping-social-network/

Waygoz

Product Manager

In my current role, I designed, built and implemented the scalable video search engine optimization and social media marketing product offering that VideoScience currently sells to SMBs across North America. This process  involved:

- The creation of a status monitoring, tracking and reporting system;
- The recruitment of over 1000 videographers across North America;
- The development of all internal sales and operating processes;
- The creation of a large scale lead generation system using
email, webinars and telesales efforts; &
- The management of 15 employees across 3 continents.

VideoScience

Chief Operating Officer

Shoe Stor markets, manufactures and distributes a line of clear storage boxes designed specifically for footwear and fashion accessories.  Since starting Shoe Stor, I decreased bounce rates by 42.8%, increased CTR's by approximately 34.5% and grew the size of an average sale grew by 231%.

Shoe Stor products have been featured by:

- Shape;
- Sweetspot.ca;
- Shoewawa (http://tinyurl.com/Shoewawa)
- Poshglam.com
- VisAVisMag.com
- SneakerFreaker.com (http://tinyurl.com/SneakerFreakerContest)
- Outblush.com (http://tinyurl.com/outblushcom)
- Newsday
- Pink Magazine
- Charlotte Magazine
- Valley Wag
- Canada.com (http://tinyurl.com/Canada-com)
- Stylist.com (http://tinyurl.com/Stylist-com)
- Cityline
- LouLou Magazine
- The National Post
- The Toronto Sun
- The Toronto Star
- Homemakers' Magazine
- City TV's Breakfast Television
- About.com's Guide to Shoes (http://tinyurl.com/aboutShoeStor)
- Manolo's Shoe Blog (http://tinyurl.com/ManoloShoeBlog)
- ShoeaholicsAnonymous.com (http://tinyurl.com/shoeaholicdotcom)

-Shoe Stor brand products are also available from Amazon.com, Shoebuy.com, Organizeit.com, Stacksandstacks.com, Holdnstorage,  Onlineorganizing.com and Theopenskyproject.com 

-Designed the products, the website and entire supply and delivery chain; Negotiated and maintained retailer relationships.

-Designed and executed an organic search engine marketing program.

-Executed PPC campaigns for the purpose of building a multi step sales funnel


-Took units sold from 0 to several hundred thousand with zero marketing budget.

-Generate monthly revenue forecasting and reporting and manage sales budgets.

-Monitor and analyze traffic and test engaging content types (A/B split testing) to acquire new customers and retain existing ones.

-Full P&L responsibilities.

- Managed a team including an offshore manufacturing supervisor, a fulfillment manager, public relations specialists and commission-based sales people.

Shoe Stor

Founder; VP of E-Commerce

Responsible for turning around a money losing physical rehabilitation clinic.  Had full P &amp; L responsibility and managed a staff of 12.

Josh Kerbel