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    Travis Giggy

    Travis Giggy

    Head of Product & Tech, VC Lab • Founder, Akin AI • Founder, Swing by Swing (sold company 2014) • Early employee, @legalzoom.com

    Founder Palo Alto
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    Experience
    Join me at VC Lab!
    4 Open Positions · $120k–$190k/yr
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    Swing by Swing Golf
    Exit
    Swing by Swing Golf
    Founder
    Carryout.com
    Carryout.com
    Founder
    RushTix
    RushTix
    Advisor
    Cialfo - College Applications Platform
    Cialfo - College Applications Platform
    Advisor
    VC Lab
    VC Lab
    Head of Product and Technology 2021 - Present (about 5 years)
    Akin.com
    Akin.com
    Co-founder / CTO 2017 - 2021 (almost 4 years)
    Conversational AI to connect people to caretakers, support organizations, and their broader ecosystem.

    Co-founded company, raised VC. Discovered Product/Market Fit... more for Home AI via user testing with concierge tests and prototypes. Hired/managed a small team of applied AI engineers (3) and Ph.D. researchers Leveraged USE, BERT, to create models to predict personality from everyday conversation. Created a DAG-based expert system with memory for conversational interactions.

    - Conceptualized Company and Raised MM Venture Capital ─ Together with a legendary co-founder, projected the future of technology, created an appropriate story, built presentation decks, and networked with VCs to sell the idea and raise capital.

    - Created the World's First Personality Prediction Models ─ Hired a cross-functional team of AI engineers and a psychologist, trained algorithms to predict personality traits during conversation in order to improve connection with the user.

    - Constructed a Management Framework to run a High-Performing Product Team across 3 Continents ─ An international company from the start, produced a structure emphasizing Vision Documents, Product Roadmaps, Video Check-Ins, Appropriate Communication Channels, and Written Documentation captured in a centrally accessible location.

    - Implemented a prototype-driven product discovery process ─ Followed a Value/Usability/Feasibility/Business (VUFB) Framework and conducted 100’s conversations with enterprises, government officials, and individual consumers to create a new social impact product.

    - Created Home Assistant Prototypes ─ With Raspberry Pi + flat-screen television, installed in family kitchens, and iterated several times until discovering a product/market/business fit in the disability home caregiver space to create a product which could support a venture scale company.

    Tech stack: Google Cloud, Node.js, JavaScript, Python, ArangoDB graph database, Bootstrap. Facebook, Slack APIs.
    Two Six Capital
    Two Six Capital
    Head of Engineering 2016 - 2017 (over 1 year)
    Data Science for due diligence and value creation in Private Equity

    Expert level data engineering manager. Ingest, clean, structure, and analyze billions of rows of... more data. Created a high-quality data engineering hiring funnel via local universities and internships.

    - Turned-Around the Tech Team and Infrastructure ─ To counter a standstill, installed a secure, high performance, cost-efficient new data infrastructure on AWS, turned over non-performing Data Engineers and Scientists and created a new data pipeline for ingesting, cleaning, and preparing data for analysis.

    - Executed on 200% more business compared to the 12-months Before Arrival ─ With a 50% Cost Reduction in tech infrastructure. In 16 months analyzed $70B of transaction revenue, to help Clients Close $11B Of Private Equity Transactions.

    - Strengthened Talent Pipeline to Attract High-Quality Data Scientists ─ Created an internship program from leading Data Scientists programs, received applications from 100’s of graduating students from Stanford, UPenn, Carnegie Mellon, more.
    - Interviewed, Tested, and Hired a Group of 8 Interns ─ Created an onboarding program structured projects so they could contribute, and created opportunities for networking, fun, learning, and to be highly productive interns.
    - Result ─ 4 offers to interns with 3 hired after graduation.

    Tech Stack: AWS, Clustered Redshift, streaming Spark, Virtualenv, Jupyter Notebooks, Python, R, Looker. Statistical algorithms. BTYD, proportional hazards, retail, and subscription retention models (BG/BB, Pareto, SBG, ARIMA, etc.). Some machine learning like K-means clustering, regression.
    Skuchain
    Skuchain
    Senior Product Manager 2015 - 2016 (about 1 year)
    Blockchain financial instruments for global trade

    - Product Management for the Future of the Supply Chain Industry ─ Using Skuchain’s Blockchain Technology, launched... more their flagship Digital Letters of Credit product using a collaborative product discovery process to discover the technology’s core value and the regulatory environment it had to exist in.

    - Champion, Company Evangelist & Public Speaking ─ To promote our fledgling company and product, networked to create speaking opportunities on 4 continents with 100’s of bankers. Accepted into Wells Fargo’s Accelerator Program, they became an investor and a pilot customer.
    Swing by Swing Golf
    Exit
    Swing by Swing Golf
    Founder 2008 - 2014 (almost 7 years)
    Swing by Swing was a native mobile app for iPhone and Android, launched in 2008. Over time, we became the world's most popular golf software, with nearly 3M registered users... more in 139 countries, representing ~10% of the worldwide golfing market. The company was sold to Back9Network in June 2014.

    - Implemented Novel Business Model ─ Unproven at the time, the freemium model allowed us to give our app away for free, in exchange for user maps, data entry, and virality. Monetized with ads and upgrades. Within 6 months of launching, we had mapped 98% of the world’s golf courses, and in 5 years became the world’s most used golf software.

    - Built an app that people loved, Rated 4.5 Stars on Apple App Store and Google Play ─ Created and launched a complicated application with a high-quality user experience by organizing and cultivating a group of devoted Beta testers, worked with engineering to create prototypes and new versions, and iteratively collect feedback and performance data.

    - Created Mobile App Capturing 3 Million Users ─ As Co-Founder developed a popular app for the affluent golfer audience by using smartphones as a platform to offer a differentiated, valuable, and popular product to build a business on top of.

    Tech stack: AWS, Heroku, GitHub, Java, Objective C, .Net, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, SQL, Redis, Google APIs.
    LegalZoom.com
    LegalZoom.com
    Front End Engineer 2003 - 2008 (almost 5 years)
    I was the first technical architect for LegalZoom.com. I built much of the early code-base along with the founder, Eddie Hartman (see attached letter of recommendation), and... more watched the company grow from 18 to over 500 employees during my time.

    Like most early employees of any company, I wore a lot of hats. At one time or another I was also responsible for
    - Creating customer facing website
    - Creating reporting infrastructure
    - Conceptualizing and building the affiliate program
    - SEO initiatives
    - R&D / Disruptive models
    - Project management

    Primarily worked with ASP / .NET / SQL / Javascript
    RideOnTime.com
    RideOnTime.com
    Co Founder 2005 - 2006 (almost 2 years)
    RideOnTime had the exact same business model as Uber and Lyft, but we started it before the mobile revolution, and w/o peer-to-peer drivers. We raised $500K and operated for... more approximately 2 years before shuttering.
    Carryout.com
    Carryout.com
    Co Founder 1998 - 2000 (about 2 years)
    Carryout.com was the world’s first online food ordering and delivery service. You could order food from any local participating restaurant and have it delivered right to your... more door. Similar to Uber Eats, DoorDash, GrubHub, and Seamless today.

    We invented several new ways to use technology, including software fax servers, real-time pager notifications, and automated phone calls with a text-to-voice engine.
    Founder
    Swing by Swing Golf, Carryout.com
    Employee
    LegalZoom.com, Skuchain, Carryout.com, RideOnTime.com, Swing by Swing Golf, Two Six Capital, Akin.com, VC Lab
    Investor
     
    Incubator
     
    Advisor
    RushTix, Cialfo - College Applications Platform
    Attorney
     
    Board Member
     
    Mentor
     
    Member
     
    Acquired
     
     
    Projects
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    About
    Achievements

    I have been an early and significant part of two rocket ship startups. I have started and sold my own companies.

    Describe the most impressive thing you've done.
    Skills
    Product Management Software Development Data Science Machine Learning Javascript
    Locations
    San Francisco Los Angeles Denver Palo Alto
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