Will Kessler Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, Ca, Us

San Francisco, Us

Sydecar makes private investing dead simple, so deal organizers can focus on what matters most: building relationships and sourcing investment opportunities.I'm proud to oversee our product and engineering groups, ensuring we bring the most powerful private equity platform to market. My group is the largest at the company, with PMs, EM's, and engineers working together to build all of our internal and external products. I built this group from the ground up to ensure we all have a respectful and motivating place to work.And, we're hiring! If you want a great place to work that's also a fast-moving, exciting, venture-funded startup with real traction, please visit https://sydecar.io/careers.

Mountain View, California, Us

In this role, I oversee engineering and product for all of Udacity's content creation systems as well as our entire classroom experience. I manage a team of 10 engineers and work tightly with our other teams to create the best online learning experience around.Some accomplishments while at Udacity:* Integrated Team and Technology from Udacity's acquisition of Terminal.com* Greatly expanded range of configurations for Udacity's interactive Workspaces learning environments, including Jupyter Notebooks/Labs, SQL explorer, autograders, GPUs, turtle graphics. 3d streaming desktops, Windows desktops* Launched tech underneath the new Rapid Content Model (RCM) to rapidly onboard many outsourced instructors and reduce launch times from months to weeks.* Created Mocha, our new CMS (from inception, user research and planning through launches) working tightly with the Content team and Product, and led successful, on-time Alpha, MVP and V1 launches. * Oversaw and personally built Classroom integrations for 3 partner content launches: Microsoft, Intel (Dev Cloud), Nutanix* Created open-sourced Jupyter Graffiti, which accelerates screencast recording and provides students truly “hands-on” side-by-side learning experiences, now in use in many of our Nanodegrees (eg C++).* Expanded the team from an initial 4 engineers to 10* Helped build a respectful, supportive community at Udacity. I have been privileged to be awarded 19 YouRock Awards, nominated for 3 Udaciwards and won the Impact Driven Award

Mountain View, California, Us

I run a team helping to build advanced tools for our next generation of classroom experiences. Since April 2017 I've overseen the integration of the Terminal.com team into Udacity.In September 2017 we launched several IDE's for students to work on their projects in the cloud: a coding IDE, a Jupyter Notebook IDE, and a SQL IDE, all based on Cloudlabs technology. These are helping students learn in advanced courses like Data Analysis, AI, Robotics, and React. Tens of thousands of students now benefit from Workspaces every day.

As Head of Product, I oversee product development, client management, and to a large extent, engineering management.I am also hands-on to a light extent, building prototypes that customers can vet, building test suites and helping the engineering team with tricky debugging issues. This is a new experience for me as I am usually very hands-on, but in this case the team here is extremely capable and fast, so what they really need is clear product vision to execute on. That's what I'm providing from day to day.

I am helping Terminal.com build their next suite of powerful cloud products and honing our market fit by acquiring new clients.

Remote First, Us

CrunchBase is the world's leading database of startup information: companies, products, fundings, investors, entrepreneurs, and news. It was started 8 years ago as part of TechCrunch, and was acquired three years ago by AOL. It supports millions of visitors monthly and its newsletter sports the highest industry open/CTR and on-site ad revs, thanks to its high-income subscriber base. 100% uptime is a given.At hire, I managed a team of 8-9 engineers, 1 devops, 1 QA for four months to drive toward the April 2014 relaunch of CrunchBase with an entirely new platform/codebase/team. After a successful launch, we focused on bringing CB2.0 fully to parity with the previous offering, as well as leverage our new graph-based technology in features like Graph Insights, Advanced Search, and the Investor Leaderboard. Since launch, I've streamlined our SDLC, formalized our QA/CI/deployment processes, and brought on additional staffers: 1 QA, 1 Devops, 1 mobile developer, and several platform engineers, including a data-analysis expert. Also, of course, once our code is live the buck stops with me, so we have many systems in place to ensure 24/7 up time, e.g. monitoring and alerts, both for our user-base and our content teams.The past couple months, I've co-led our efforts on 4 major upcoming product offerings. While the majority of my job is ensuring that engineers are productive, motivated and happy, I nonetheless pitch in to code, bug fix, deploy, and build automated systems (e.g. in Ansible) as needed to accelerate development and analytics, and can be hands on with most every part of it.Our platform is Rails, but we also use just about every other web tool out there (it's a complex stack) as well as a ton of 3rd party services, and I interface and negotiate with most of these services.

Fresh helps new, upcoming brands acquire customers through its unique promotions.I lead the technology strategy and co-design our core offering.

Austin, Texas, Us

PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice are the SAAS leaders in ratings/reviews and question/answer software. Clients comprise more than half of the IR500, with logos such as Best Buy, REI, Gap, and Walmart, as well as thousands of SMBs worldwide.• At PowerReviews, I managed a team of 8 engineers in 3 teams to launch the Essential Social Suite—a group of offerings adding social sharing, product discovery and highly enabled consumer advocacy (Community) to its basic ratings & reviews products. As Engineering Director, I managed hiring, promotion, engineering resource budgets, oversaw the full SDLC release process (java/spring/hibernate/velocity/postgres), and evaluated and recommended new technologies. Worked tightly with Product Managers and Customer Support to ensure we launched and provided world-class services.• In addition, I architected the next generation of content delivery for PowerReviews. Where previously content was delivered statically in zip files, the new system could dynamically deliver more lively, fresher, SEO-optimized content, yet still scale to the millions of daily pageviews required.• In addition, I assisted the company with due diligence procedures towards its acquisition by Bazaarvoice in the summer of 2012.• At Bazaarvoice, I currently oversee 8 engineers and 2 contractors on four initiatives: Loyalty (consumer advocacy), BV Local (supporting distributorships), BV Express (previously PowerReviews’ SMB offering), and PowerReviews Core stack. • Loyalty, BV Local, and BV Express are being rebuilt on BV’s new Conversations 2013 platform under my supervision. This new platform employs a very similar design/technology stack to the “next gen system” that I architected for PowerReviews.

Built analysis system to extract population demographics across six dimensions (gender, age, income, etc) from US census data, at the level of a census tract (in other words, very localized), for this ad-targeting company.

Built innovative social game : Question Party. Hit 5 million members in 4 months on a miniscule ad budget (<$1K), all through regular viral channels.

I advised the founders on product design and technology choices, and then built all their technology through their live beta (as a contractor, working alone). At beta, I helped them choose a worthy successor and managed the handoff.More recently, I helped SkinnyScoop scale their systems to handle increased load using AWS autoscaling and monitoring, and simplified their rollout procedures.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Minted LLC is an e-commerce play that has raised significant private capital. I am in charge of the technology buildout and strategy.

New York, Ny, Us

Designer of core influence algorithm that pinpoints influential people and sites on any topic; in charge of real-time search index covering millions of pages in the blogosphere. Contributed key sections of BuzzLogic's patents.

Basingstoke, Hampshire, Gb

I am overseeing the team building our online brokering system. We're building with Tomcat/Struts and Mysql on RH8.

Needham, Ma, Us

IDG.net is International Data Group's portal and search engine of over 250 websites worldwide. I managed its initial launch, which included product channels, and then presided over the site's relaunch, with new channel and story designs. Underneath IDG.net, we built the V2 publishing system.

Msme, Product Design & Cs

Bsme, Product Design/Computer Graphics