The work I like
I’ve built 3 tech companies from zero (read about them below). In the last 18 years, my product focus has been:
- Product based growth. Mostly in apps, identify retention levers, (ii) onboard users to be exposed to those retention levers, obsessing over users’ first 10 mins, their D1, W3, etc; (iii) create processes and learning loops that help the team guide users’ behaviour and succeed. I explained some of that work in how we grew from 0 to 4 million women on our app;
- Unsupervised learning systems. I’ve built such systems in music, finance and fashion. I’ve done this by (i) building web & app interfaces where users are incentivized to provide their listening behaviour, their daily expenses, or their what-to-wear needs; (ii) building the data systems that end up understanding incoming unstructured data; and (iii) building automations on top of that understanding, its ontologies and graphs. I wrote about some of this on Taste graphs: How to understand fashion taste like Spotify does with music. Also, you can watch easy-to-consume videos on products built on top of unsupervised learning systems here in fashion and here in music;
- I love certain team dynamics. Communication of purpose, culture and an actionable metric for each team; clear ownership with a single backlog; willingness to do less & reduce s/t scope & ship this week; quick feedback from shipping to production; decentralized, asynchronous comms; caring for the team and a strong respect for each individual. I believe that the above leads to significant impact.
Find me at Linkedin or Twitter.
Startups I have built
I’ve built 3 tech companies from zero, and have been involved in many others:
- Chicisimo (Co-founder & CEO). Fully remote. Team of 8. €3.5M raised. Shut down. We built a digital closet app that allows women to easily digitize most of their clothes in minutes, and then see how other real women wear their same clothes (5M installs 95% non-paid, featured as App of the Day in 140 countries). We built an unsupervised learning model (ontology, taste graph, clothes classifier…) that learnt from users’ closet & outfit data, their queries and interactions. You can see the product in action, our retention, our learning model in this link 👉
- Strands, Inc. (VP Growth, Board director, founding team). San Francisco, US. Team of 120. $55M raised. Acquired. We started in 2004 by logging people’s online music listening behaviour, and built an agnostic personalization engine on top of incoming user data. In 2007, we pivoted to logging people’s credit card payments and bank data, and built an enduring business. Our patents were acquired by Apple in 2012, and the company was fully acquired by CRIF in March 2020. You can read more about Strands in this link here 👉🏽
- Saktec Robotics. (Co-founder & CEO). Barcelona. Team of 9. Acquired. At Saktec Robotics, we used software to design and build robotic welding cells. We were a services company with components developed in-house. Our clients were the engineering firms that build car manufacturing plants. I made sure we had a great team with the right tools and processes, and (ii) great clients. You can watch a video of one of our designs or read further details about what we built at Saktec Robotics, here.
My Patent Portfolio
I’ve been involved in IP protection since 2004 in the fields of taste capturing, personalization and ecommerce. In the last 8 years, the focus of my 6 US patents has been to protect innovations generated from the information contained inside an image. Systems and methods to:
- Extract correlations among items in an image (ie: an outfit) and from correlations in a closet;
- Link items in an image to shoppable products (to enable features such as “shop the look”);
- Fashion Taste Graph on top of large amounts of taste data; several use cases of personalization and recommendations.
I’ve been granted 6 US patents and I have filed for a new one. You can read about them in the patent portfolio here.
My Posts
- My experience in the former Yugoslavia as United Nations International Observer (2010);
- Me cago en Silicon Valley (2011);
- The Guide to Alexa SEO (2020);
- Our return from the US (2009);
- Internet is the new TV (2008);
- Our product is explanation (2008);
- Sidebar blogging goes mainstream (2008);
- La industria del fastfood informativo (2007);
Chicisimo related:
- Chicisimo Post-Mortem (October 2020);
- How to proceed when you run out of cash, but you still believe? We wanted to give visibility to our situation, so we submitted the post to Hacker News. It was in HN front page, in 2nd/3rd position, during 20 hours (December 2019);
- How we grew from 0 to 4 million women on our fashion app, with a vertical machine learning approach. It was in the front page of Hacker News during almost an entire day (February 2018);
- In-store outfit recommender: Matching the clothes in your closet with garments you are about to buy (July 2019);
- Taste graphs: How to understand fashion taste like Spotify does with music (May 2019).
All posts can be found here.