Neo

Neo is global product design and development shop that acquired Proof in order to expand their UX and lean competency and anchor their New York City practice.

Neo/Proof projects in the latter half of 2012 included agile/product management coaching at Refinery 29, and a multi-month project with American Express OPEN helping them design and build an internal incubator, including developing several MVPs.

Unpakt

Proof Client

Unpakt is creating the Kayak of the moving industry. My role was to act as product owner, drive the product to being live and earning revenue, and help the client adapt to Pivotal Labs' agile processes. I also worked to bring "lean startup" practices to the team's thinking and processes.

What I did: Product manager/owner (startup strategy, story creation / prioritization / acceptance, analytics), User Experience (user research and regular usability tests, wireframe/mockup design at various fidelity), front-end implementation (sass/slim on rails).

Ohai

Weekend hackathon project

Ohai it's me! is a personal timeline that pulls in one's social feeds from services like Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, Tumblr, and Last.fm. Some friends and I built it over a weekend hackathon for my 40th birthday. The code is open-source on github for anyone who wants to create and host their own via heroku.

I focused on the front-end, designing and building the UX and UI. It was a fun excuse to built a mobile-web-first, responsive interface, and I got to play with some new CSS tricks using pseudo-elements.

Proof

Lean innovation agency

Co-founded Proof, a product innovation studio that combines lean processes with strategy, design and technology.

Beyond client work, I'm also designing and implementing our web/brand presence as time allows.

Unpakt

continued into 2012

Subjot

UX/UI design

Subjot is a social platform started by two friends of mine that creates an interest graph by separating topics and social relationships.

In between consulting projects over the year, I stepped in to re-design the UI, contribute UX designs, and implement their front-end (HTML and CSS on Ruby on Rails back-end).

FanFeedr

Product strategy consulting

FanFeedr delivers real-time sports coverage to fans for their favorite teams, covering both news and social media.

What I did: Extensive customer development including paper tests and live prototypes; designing and building the front-end of those prototypes; strategic review of the sports information space and Fanfeedr's positioning. Combined, it led to a pivot to their current direction.

Birchbox

UX consulting

Birchbox is a beauty and lifestyle subscription-commerce business.

This was a fun project over a period of several weeks working with the Birchbox team and their customer base. The work teed up their site redesign for later in the year. The process included creating wireframes for internal discussion and then running a series of user interviews with medium-fidelity clickable mockups.

Voxy

Game design consulting

Voxy is breaking new ground in language learning via Web and mobile experiences. I advised them on game design and how to adapt gaming ideas to their learning context.

Aprizi

Co-Founder & CEO

Aprizi was a “Pandora for shopping” for fashion and home decor products from independent designers.

Liz Crawford and I spent the year on the project, and there were three things I loved: 1. working with Liz; 2. working with indie creators of beautiful products; 3. putting lean startup concepts into practice. We evolved quite a bit over that year, originally starting as an email mining technology to deliver product recommendations and deals. Our last iteration was starting to click with users (12K active monthly users after 3 months) but we decided to shut it down in light of risk and financial pressures.

What did I do? All business responsibilities including marketing and customer development, UX & UI design and implementation (mockups / HTML / CSS).

The Electric Sheep Company

VP, Products

ESC designed and created virtual worlds and social games.

In 2009, while much of our time was spent on the professional services side of ESC selling, designing, and building game/virtual world experiences for clients, I led a skunkworks team that designed and prototyped out a social live music application. I also built out relationships with the major music publishers.

Social TV app

Product design

One of my side projects in 2009 was a second-screen social TV game, where viewers could share comments, polls and pictures to friends while watching a show. We built it out in Flash and tested it with different kinds of shows (great for sports and reality tv, bad for dramas), but ultimately it got tabled until recently when the other members of the team brought it back to life as an iPad app.

The Electric Sheep Company

VP, Products

ESC designed and created virtual worlds and social games.

2008 was a tricky year for ESC as we tried to re-invent ourselves in the wake of exiting the Second Life business. We had to decide whether to become a game publisher (my preference) or revert to professional services. The board chose to go with the latter. In an effort to make ourselves more competitive and improve margins, we built a web-based virtual worlds platform called "Webflock".

Much of this year was spent dealing with the company restructuring that followed the strategic shift, managing the team building Webflock, and helping clients analyze and model virtual goods monetization models.

The Electric Sheep Company

VP, Products

ESC designed and created virtual worlds and social games.

In 2007, we placed a bet that Second Life could become a significant new platform, and my team was tasked with creating the Netscape and eBay of this new medium, with our media company clients as distribution partners. We launched an improved browser for Second Life, a new e-commerce platform for virtual goods, and an experimental search engine. After 9 months of work and a large project in partnership with CBS, we realized that the vision was not going to pan out. Linden Lab purchased the ecommerce platform from us and ESC exited the SL space. I managed an agile team of 10 developers, a product manager and a designer.

Avatar Expression

One of my side projects was to photograph and publish a book on personal expression through avatars in Second Life.

The Electric Sheep Company

VP, Bizdev

ESC created 3D virtual worlds experiences (even winning an Emmy for our work). I led the creation of our multi-million-dollar Second Life consulting practice... sold many of the clients, designed and built 3D experiences, and recruited our design and development team.

Virtual Architecture

I was designing and building a lot of 3D things in Second Life, and as a fun side project, I created the first 'virtual book' documenting the interesting architecture emerging in Second Life. Later on, I also put together a flickr set on SL's bridges.

Jefferies-Broadview

M&A and IPO work

Wait, what, how/why did you get back into i-banking, Giff? Well, in one of those quirks of life, I had come back from painting in London and had been consulting for a year, but neither had a company idea I was burning to launch, nor a startup I was burning to join, so when Broadview asked me to come back it felt like a good way to re-start things in NYC.

The coolest part was helping one of my clients nearly double their expected selling price.

Analytics/Strategy Consulting

The New York tech scene was pretty decimated still, but I ended up working on some interesting analytics projects for folks like Alitalia, Conoco Philips, and Merrill Lynch and a strategy project for Mitsubishi. The most rewarding project was getting to code up a series of object-oriented, visual basic brand valuation applications -- it was the first time I was able to really dive into programming.

Art

After the startup crunch, I took a breather and decided to examine my passions in art and ask myself where I wanted to take them. The short answer was that I love art, but the business of art is fairly hideous.

Opus360/FreeAgent.com

VP, Business Development

Opus360 acquired my startup Ithority (Opus360 itself went public and then was acquired by Proha plc). I led the FreeAgent.com bizdev team and drove a product re-design effort. Of course, the market also crashed which led to some rather tricky experiences, such as trying to unravel bad bubble-era bizdev deals that I inherited, and restructuring the business (i.e. laying off a lot of people).

Ithority

Founder, CEO

In which Giff finally gets to launch his first company: an online marketplace for freelancers which we pivoted to a market for expertise and advice. I co-designed the product, led customer development and our alpha/beta program, and ran all business functions. We bootstrapped the business and then sold it to Opus360 for $8M.

Envive

Sales / Product Marketing

For the last phase of my "startup apprenticeship" phase, I joined a 20-person VC-backed startup in Silicon Valley that made performance and availability software for SAP installations. I started on the product marketing side and managed the launch of their first product, and then switched over to sales to close our first customers (given the SAP install base, these were big companies like Chevron, Rockwell, Pacificorp). Learning how to manage a pipeline and close business was a tremendously useful experience.

Broadview

Tech M&A, Senior Analyst

I wanted to learn finance before starting a company, so I "apprenticed" myself at Broadview, a boutique investment bank that focused on the technology sector. This work entailed extensive financial modeling and industry research. I got to work on some cool deals, such as Microsoft-Linkage, Geac-D&B Software, and i2 Software-Optimax.

Trilogy

Marketing / Bizdev

This was my first job out of Princeton. I was interviewing in different fields and Trilogy, a successful enterprise software startup, took out an ad in the school newspaper. Once I got a glimpse of tech entrepreneurship, I was hooked, and I convinced them to hire me. Trilogy was 75 people when I joined and grew to about 1,000 employees. The company is still around, albeit not quite so big and with a new model. I helped launch what became pcOrder.com (IPOed in 1999), recruited a VAR distribution channel for Trilogy, and worked on a developer task force focused on increasing customer engagement.