James Kawas Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, Ca, Us

San Francisco, Us

Flyp raised $15 Million to build AI to support millions of online sellers. Forbes Magazine says “Flyp Is Giving The Resale Industry A New Meaning".

Personal portfolio includes: Discord, Skillshare, Brex, OpenSea, Boom Supersonic, Worldcoin, GrubMarket, Burrow, Ellevest, Atmos, Buffalo Market, 1517 Fund (LP), Irrvrnt VC (LP), Draft Capital (LP), Sustainable Food Ventures (LP), and more...

Jersey City, Nj, Us

As a member of the Forbes Technology Council, I provided expert commentary for Forbes magazine and media network on the topics of e-commerce, consumer technology and venture capital.

Palo Alto, California, Us

After building a successful mobile marketplace and scaling it to more than a million users in the US, the team behind Saily joined Mercari to help the company grow in the US and IPO at a $4 billion valuation.At Mercari I formed the company's first Product Growth team, a cross-functional team that spans across 5 different departments including product, engineering, user acquisition (growth), design, and marketing. The team operated like an internal experiments lab with the goal of identifying, testing and scaling product opportunities with high growth impact.The team went on to ship projects that radically increased core metrics across the board (+60% increase in buyer conversion, +35% increase in seller conversion, +20% in listing conversion, +120% PLA and Facebook ads ROI). The team was also responsible for the development of key brand elements including slogans, CTAs, and copy that was pushed nationally on billboards, TV, and radio. At the heart of our work was a focus on user experience research, a passion for behavioral psychology, a knack for conversion optimization and a solid understanding of unit economics.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Update: The Saily team joined Mercari ahead of its $1.2 billion IPO. During my time as CEO of Saily, I led an amazing team of world-renown engineers, designers, and product managers, and raised investment from angels and venture capital firms to build one of the very first secondhand marketplaces on mobile. I led the growth efforts scaling the marketplace to over 1,000,000+ users with 30% MoM growth rate ranking Saily as one of the top shopping apps on the App Store and Google Play. Our work has been featured by Apple several times and has caught global media attention from publications like Forbes, Bloomberg Business Week, Entrepreneur Magazine, The Huffington Post, Yahoo Finance, VICE, Mashable and others.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Became part of the Thiel Fellowship program and received $100,000 backing from Peter Thiel for my work on Saily. Founded by technology entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel, the Thiel Fellowship is a program for young entrepreneurs and scientists who want to build new things. Thiel Fellows skip or stop out of college to receive a $100,000 grant and support from the Thiel Foundation’s network of founders, investors, and scientists.

At the age of 14, my career started as a software developer building and selling websites/apps to clients from my bedroom. As my business grew, I quickly had to shift my role towards managing a team of contracting engineers and designers. This lead to the founding of Pheel Agency, a software development agency specialized in mobile app development. Pheel provided software services and consultancy to the region's most prominent media companies and large consumer brands from the P&G portfolio. It was during my time running Pheel that I worked with Dani, the engineer who became my co-founder in my next venture.