Running platform, web, direct to consumer, business applications, IT, data, operations and cloud. So far.

Venture investing and technical advisory with a large growth equity fund with $2B AUM including lead on Leonardo.ai (exited to Canva), sourcing Eleven Labs and advising (product, engineering, design, go to market, technology due diligence) for portfolio companies. Focussed primarily on emerging tech (AI, gaming, etc) and emerging market segments driven by new technology.

Fender Digital was created as a new division of Fender from the ground up, and I was hired as Fender’s first Chief Digital Officer, a position I held for the duration. I also functioned as the divisions General Manager. I managed the engineering, product, design/UI/UX, content studio, QA, direct to consumer and content departments and their VP’s.I lead a division from $0 to over $100m in revenue, including engineering, design, content production, subscription systems (SVOD), backend platform and operations, direct to consumer, mobile and web products and QA. My team was up to 75 people, global. I also was the digital operator of the company, including vendor selection, M&A activity, investments and part of the team leading to the exit from private equity for FMIC.More can be found here, including all press clippings: https://ethankaplan.com/moving-on-part-2-a-not-so-brief-history-of-seven-years-at-fender-9330b410e4af

General manager of the music business focusing on metadata, music identification/content recognition and partner management with Apple, Facebook, etc.

Responsible for overseeing the product, engineering, design and operations for Live Nation's consumer facing properties, including LiveNation.com, iOS and Android applications, our content network and API/Platform.In the last three years we relaunched every major consumer product from the ground up including iOS, Android, Web (http://livenation.com) and the platform to support all of them.My team was over 28 engineers, some designers, product, analysts and operations/devops between San Francisco and Los Angeles.Live Nation Labs was founded in 2011 as an innovation center for Live Nation Entertainment. The department was started from a blank slate and built up to include over 70 employees between multiple offices, including content production, engineering, design and product teams.As a part of Labs I:- Acquired and integrated three companies into our team- Managed partner and business development relationships in the technology industry- Built a solid engineering culture oriented around personal accountability, rapid development and iterative refinement- Maintained speed and uptime availability on primary ecommerce funnels on both desktop and mobile- Implemented a solid "lean" engineering and product culture oriented around testing, metrics and fast deliverables. We shipped daily to production.- Had the highest employee satisfaction rating world wide for three years running (2012, 2013, 2014)My engineers, designers and product leads who departed went on to Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Shyp (founding team), Twilio and Uber

I was responsible for all that is new, cool and interesting in technology for our roster of artists labels and organizations (Warner Bros. Records, Atlantic, Rhino, WEA and Warner Music International): from iPhone apps, websites, consumer data analysis, business and tactical intelligence tools, new technology coming on the market and business development.In my time at Warner Music Group, I lead the technology team, responsible for:* Creation of an infrastructure, including servers, web architectures and systems to power a Direct to Consumer initiative including 250 websites and 25 million a year in revenue.* Integration of new technology including big data and consumer insights platforms into the organization* Research and development into new methods of creating revenue from recorded music and fan interaction* Creation of a workflow that ultimately had an up to five site a week output.

I ran the technology division of the company, which was entirely focused on the external facing aspect of our technological innovation. This means anything on the web, consumer electronics, digital services, research and development into emerging platforms and just over-all geekiness. We were one of the few strict technology divisions in the music business.I was basically a startup-type CTO in a music company, reporting directly to the CEO and Chairman. In my time there we redeveloped the entire web infrastructure including creating an open-source Platform on which we launch Direct to Consumer (D2C) websites. We had 130 sites on the platform currently serving over 1.5 million unique visitors a week and driving over 25m in incremental revenue.I also had a key role in business development, technology partnerships and acquisitions working with company executives, artists, managers and music industry executives.

I was a teaching associate in the art department at UCSB, teaching classes on digital art, conceptual theory, punk music history, post-structuralism/modernism and tactical media.My art practice consisted of engineering multi-dimensional graph systems, machine learning and data visualization. As well as experimentation in wearable computing.I contributed to exhibits at the Venice Bienalle and the Dutch Electronic Arts festival.

I worked in various areas during the dot-com era, mostly doing technology development and online community development.During this time I was a partner with the in-house venture-capital firm, doing due-diligence on early-stage startups as well as helping bootstrap their technology implementations. Our investments included MyOC.com, ColoradoSprings.com, DrDrew.com and a partnership with Garage Technology Ventures.

Implemented the first online community for the Orange County Register and associated products.

At 16 I was the first webmaster at a major newspaper, helping the OCR launch the small website for the Pulitzer Prize winning expose on the UCI fertility fraud scandal, and later integration of the rest of the paper on to the web. This included classified systems, pagination to database conversions and dynamic web publishing. I had engineering responsibility across the entire production workflow.Considering this was 1995, the team and I were true pioneers on the Internet. The Orange County Register was only the fifth newspaper put online.