Michael Schade Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, Ca, Us

I work on emergent and cross-cutting problems, whatever they may be. Using a combo of applied research, engineering, and good ol' operational roll-up-your-sleeves tactics, my goal is to make OpenAI the most customer obsessed company in the world, in service of bringing about safe AGI to benefit humanity.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

I'm establishing the support product, tooling, and team stack to bring stellar support to OpenAI customers worldwide.

Kenchi (https://kenchi.com/) is a new way to scale stellar support teams. Kenchi works with companies like Notion, Outschool, and OpenPhone to serve as their team brain: Kenchi makes collaboration a snap by keeping workflows, best practices, and data-driven insights all in one place. The primary interface is a browser extension that supercharges your support team, backed up by an insights-driven dashboard that helps you pinpoint the best product, content, and training opportunities. Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce, your own internal admin tools—you name it: Kenchi sits on top of your existing platforms to enhance your team where they already are.

South San Francisco, California, Us

I started and led the Leverage engineering group at Stripe, born out of our original internal tooling team when leading support. We worked across products, infrastructure, and company culture to help Stripe grow as a global company, spanning the gap from internal to external products and the organizational changes in between. We focused on three key areas:* how we talk to and learn from our users by treating support as a first-class product feature,* our admin platform and underlying workflow platforms that turn many Stripes into tool creators, and* Collaboration, a cross-functional effort thinking through how Stripes work together worldwideOur team was a distributed, tight-knit, user- and data- oriented team, with a high degree of autonomy for individuals and new leaders within the group. The team launched 24x7 free phone and chat support for all Stripe users (https://stripe.com/en-US/blog/phone-and-chat-support), new support features baked right into the Dashboard (https://stripe.com/support-and-services), launched a workflow engine that allowed our teams even beyond engineering to create their own tools (https://twitter.com/sch/status/1121212429138972672), and built Stripe Home, the cornerstone of our collaboration efforts (https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home). Following my previous role, I remained deeply involved in the business side of scaling a high-quality support offering while we expanded our workflow and cultural investments across Stripe.While leading this group, I also served on our eng staff group as one of our pillar leads, where I had the opportunity to work with engineers throughout Stripe on improvements to our hiring process (such as candidate review and new recruiting sourcing efforts), our levels and ladders refresh process, and forums like our all-hands and mentorship groups.

South San Francisco, California, Us

I'd been using Stripe for quite some time for my own business, and had received excellent support from the team already working at Stripe—I couldn't help but want to give similar experiences for other Stripe users. So I joined to found the support team, and ended up scaling it from 2 to 21 people.My real job is to do whatever's needed. Projects I worked on included creating and managing the hiring pipeline for Support Engineering and Account Support (defining the roles, developing the interview frameworks, training interviewers, sourcing, interviewing, and onboarding), launching chat support, quality assurance and training, managing customer-facing incidents, defining and building team metrics, surfacing ongoing product improvements, and building tools to improve our efficiency (from quick Chrome extensions to full fledged services for metrics, triaging, and user support).During this time, I had the opportunity to manage one of our largest partners, help out with early sales conversations, and give talks about Stripe, including at TechCrunch Disrupt, UserVoice Summit, and BoxWorks.

Started as a freelance outfit, Spearhead Development was a company I cofounded in high school for random engineering work I came across. I helped setup the IT for a local a consignment shop in St. Louis, built the website and backend for a subscription-based air filter business, and launched some small experimental websites for myself.This ended up turning into a startup called meld, where we built a contact exchange service—basically, always up-to-date business cards. We worked with conferences like Strange Loop to enable attendees to network and make lasting connections with one another.