Patrick Brand Email & Phone Number

Boston, Ma, Us

Operators club focused on the startup community in and around Boston.

San Francisco Bay Area, Us

Volunteer community of operational experts (People, Finance, Ops) across the startup world. I'm currently working as part of the Storytelling team on developing newsletters and social media materials to help publicize the community, its partners, and its message.

United States, Us

Community focused on publicizing and supporting the Chief of Staff role in both the startup and corporate ecosystems.

Providing project management, editorial, and consulting services to startups.

Boston, Ma, Us

In this role, I took on additional responsibilities assisting the CEO with special projects (e.g., managing our investor funnel; selecting a new outsourced bookkeeping service to reduce costs by 60%; benchmarking competitors and driving a process that produced the company’s first pricing manual), venture fundraising (co-leading all aspects of pitch development, investor relations, and diligence/data room management, helping to close $18M in successive rounds over the length of my tenure) and also helping other area heads to create OKRs, both for the company and for the specific area, which drew on the holistic understanding of the business I had built over the years. I also worked on the rollout of the Entrepreneurial Operating System framework for both the senior management team and the functional teams.My narrative work for the company also continued to pay off, in the form of helping Slang land a place among the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers cohort for 2022.

Boston, Ma, Us

In this role, I scaled the Content Team team to sixteen talented curriculum developers: an international team that leveraged the latest in NLP to create content at scale. Under my leadership, content offering grew by a hundred courses during this period, and the underlying lexical and topical databases that we used to power those courses also increased in size tremendously, covering thousands of topics, tens of thousands of example sentences and paragraphs, and hundreds of thousands of terms across three languages (English, Spanish, and Portuguese). Our engineering, design, and product management processes also matured, and my work with the CTO extended to become a broader partnership with the engineers and designers we hired to develop our content toolset, for which I regularly defined requirements and performed acceptance testing. Our efforts further reduced course production time to just one week—one of my proudest achievements.To tell the company’s story, my marketing responsibilities also expanded: I worked on brochures, success cases, blog posts, and client proposals, all with an aim toward explaining our value prop, acquiring over a hundred customers, and bringing in additional investors. Of special note is my work on Slang’s first social impact report, which helped us draw in impact investment funding, and crafting the winning pitch for the Global Edtech Startup Awards for the 2020-2021 cycle.My operational responsibilities also grew at this time: I took full ownership over the US operation (recruiting, onboarding, benefits, compliance, bookkeeping liaison, corporate credit card management, and office management, among other things) and wrote Slang’s first organizational culture deck to help guide our growing team.

Boston, Ma, Us

I joined at the start of Slang's story and founded the Content function. In this role, I took the content offering from one proof-of-concept professional English course to 30, with the breadth spanning many distinct professional areas: corporate finance, entrepreneurship, software development, graphic design, medicine, logistics, and more. This role required me to build everything from scratch: editorial processes, documentation, quality assurance, and the actual linguistic data itself, central to the company’s IP portfolio. To help scale production, I hired and trained six talented curriculum developers, implemented content productivity and quality tracking systems, and worked with the CTO to co-lead the development of a bespoke, ML-powered content production toolset. These efforts successfully reduced course production time from one year to just two months. Also on my plate were helping to establish Slang’s brand and presence, putting together its first social media calendar and content strategy leading into its first revenue, and working with the CEO to craft the winning pitch at the LearnLaunch Across Boundaries conference, which led to the company closing its first institutional round.Finally, I cut my teeth on broader management responsibilities here, learning the ins-and-outs of human resource management for our burgeoning team and taking on the management of personnel and office space issues as they came up.

Managed technology products in Cengage Learning's World Languages portfolio. I was responsible for directly managing four content developers working on World Languages tech products, along with planning of portfolio technology strategy and relationship management with partners and vendors. Each year, I initiated and oversaw the successful completion of an annual slate of tech projects (comprising things like websites, learning management systems, interactive eBooks), and to accompany those launches I was responsible for training documentation, marketing collateral, and leading live trainings for customers, field sales personnel, and internal employees.

Technology project manager responsible for the successful launch of technology products in Cengage Group's World Languages portfolio. My responsibilities involved day-to-day management of deliverables, project scope, and internal and external subject-matter experts. I was also a key player in ensuring successful launches of new titles through the extensive training and marketing support I provided.

Responsible for Spanish and Italian titles published in the higher education and Advanced Placement market spaces. I leveraged my language and teaching expertise to realize diverse supplements packages created to meet instructor and student needs on multiple AAA titles per publishing year, typically 5-10 annually. I also developed content and managed freelance subject-matter experts as part of a high-performance publishing team. I played an important role in assisting acquisitions editors in signing new talent to grow list revenue and bring fresh and innovative content to market.

Columbus, Ohio, Us

Responsible for the management and coordination of technology initiatives within the Spanish and Portuguese Language Programs. Responsibilities included the creation, editing, organization and management of the department's extensive collection of teaching materials for Language Program instructors, technical support, piloting new classroom technologies, and consulting on new media projects.

Columbus, Ohio, Us

Instructor for basic- and intermediate-level Spanish language classes. Courses taught include Spanish 102.66 (Intensive Review I for high school students and experienced learners), Spanish 102.01 (Beginning Spanish I), and Spanish 104 (Intermediate Spanish II - Language Program exit course). Also responsible for offering all levels of tutoring and leading conversation sessions in both Spanish and Portuguese.

Boston, Ma, Us

Copy editor for Lux student magazine. Responsible for the editing of all submitted articles, paying attention to content, typography, form, brevity and clarity, as well as reviewing final print proofs.

Boston, Ma, Us

Responsible for a wide variety of tasks in the field of educational technology in UMass Boston's Distance Learning and Video Production Center (DLVPC). Recorded classroom sessions for streaming via the web; handled the conversion of a wide array of educational materials (audio and video) into formats suitable for faculty use; designed, edited and implemented slides for the UMass digital signage system on display throughout campus; supervised and provided technical support for online learning solutions including Blackboard/WebCT LMS, Horizon Wimba Live Classroom, and standard teleconferences conducted via Polycom or Tandberg videoconferencing units.

M.A., Spanish/Hispanic Linguistics

B.A., Spanish (Linguistics Concentration)