Ryan D. Email & Phone Number

Oakland, California, US

San Francisco, California, US

• Advising the founder & team on product strategy, product process, growth & retention.
• PerkUp allows companies to send employees incredible gifts, rewards, and swag in 130+ countries.

San Francisco, California, US

• Gained buy-in for concepts leveraging Generative AI, driving engagement & expansion strategy.
• Defined a novel use of embeddings to create student proof-of-work & improve session quality.
• Deepened taxonomies on writing context needed for Generative AI & NLP feature relevance.
• Launched a ‘Writing Score’ feature on Grammarly’s native apps to boost engagement.

San Francisco, California, US

• Guided co-founders and ran workshops with teams on product-led growth, onboarding, user research & positioning.
• ScaleGrowth helps community owners create deeply engaged and self-sustaining communities.

• Launched a 0-1 “Buy Tickets” embed. Exceeded opt-in goals, now processes $10B/yr (demo).
• Increased NPS for Payouts by 5pts by coordinating a cohesive UX across multiple teams.
• Created the financial systems to declare GAAP earnings, enabling Eventbrite to IPO (video).
• Accelerated regional SaaS pricing experiments by evolving the schema for the process.
• Teams led: Checkout, Pricing, Payouts & Order-to-Cash, helping EB to scale 4x and IPO.

San Francisco, CA, US

• Grew Yelp Ads signups by 60% and reduced paid package revenue churn rate by 20%.
• Co-launched and scaled Yelp's transaction business (delivery, deals, & GC) from 0-100M/year.
• Internationalized self-serve/sales SaaS channels for Yelp Ads & Deals to the EU & Canada.
• Drove fraud rates down to 25bps, creating rules, machine learning models, & an Ops team.
• Led negotiations with international payment processors ($1B+ in payment volume).
• Optimized top-of-the-funnel customer signups, yielding a 12% increase in signups MoM.

San Jose, CA, US

• Enabled the shutdown of international fraud rings with a strategy of standardizing verification services, reducing the turnaround time to introduce new fraud policies.
• Ran user experience design research to understand customer perception and optimize visual treatments/friction at checkpoints.
• Drove increased usage of product line internally through brown-bags and educational meetings to maximize ROI.
• Designed and launched a core platform which now supports 15 third party integrations to provide KYC/Compliance level checks in 10 countries.
• Developed business cases & have successfully pitched multiple product road-maps and strategy for funding approval to VP level team.

San Jose, CA, US

• Managed the P/L for a portfolio of fraud prevention products for use by PayPal merchants.
• Designed, launched & maintained a credit card fraud risk prevention product to accelerate the acquisition of small-medium merchants using PayPal's Pro account.
• Drove the competitive analysis of fraud prevention products targeting the online merchant space.
• Lead primary customer research (focus groups, surveys), drove segmentation of the customer base for fraud products and analyzed customer's primary drivers and needs.
• Negotiated multi-year contracts with vendors on behalf of PayPal.
• Selected 3x to present a very popular seminar on "Preventing Online Fraud" targeted at merchants & partners at the eBay conference.

San Jose, CA, US

• Conducted market research for product requirements and designed new features for the Fraud Prevention Service (FPS).
• Monitored the market for competitors and potential partners.
• Coordinated cross-functional teams to drive release schedule activities.
• Provided technical leadership on the design and implementation of the platform migration for the Fraud Prevention Service and the Mobile Payments Project.
• Managed and solved customer support escalations to meet quality of service requirements.
• Created copy and messaging for user documentation and customer communication.

Reston, Virginia (VA), US

• Part of the VeriSign Payment Services team acquired by PayPal for $370 million. See description above.

• Provided technical leadership and conducted code reviews with the team members.
• Designed a caching subsystem using Java for an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) server.
• Created a GUI layout tool using Java and Swing for EAI software.
• Developed a User & Rights Management module for a large commercial website on WebLogic.
• Researched Netscape’s LDAP API for immediate implementation and designed a simplified LDAP interface for teaching purposes and initial use on projects.
• Developed customized Java user interface code for deployment on Compaq’s Ipaq (JDK 1.1).

Armonk, New York, NY, US

• Designed and led the implementation of improvements to the department’s tools for the build process to ensure a smooth operational rhythm.
• Coordinated engineering team to help ensure daily builds for WebSphere Commerce Suite & Net.Commerce Hosting Server for the testers.
• Traced and helped debug compilation and linking problems with Java and C++ code.
• Helped manage the source control system and manage the team's Solaris and Linux workstations.

• Designed, developed and drove the implementation for a variety of products coded in Java & C++
• Project Leader for the complete cycle of design, development and testing of an application server framework written in Java based on a custom XML-RPC protocol (like SOAP).
• Designed the application server using UML and distributed responsibilities to the team.
• Developed a publicly distributed tool with international language support to allow gamers to edit texture-maps.
• Gathered requirements, and designed the Skin Editor using UML and HTML to support the diagrams.
• Created a GUI based tool using OpenGL and low-level system calls to display multiple views (with the Model View Controller pattern) of the allocation of files on RAIDs.

Master Of Business Administration - Mba, Marketing, Finance

Product Leadership, Cohort Q4 2021, Product Strategy, Cohort Q4 2020

Bachelor'S Degree, Computer Science, Software Systems