London Area, United Kingdom
A hands-on operator, working directly with founders in fast-growing AI tech start-ups (Seed - Series B). Owning Strategy & Ops, Finance, Legal & Compliance, People and anything else that needs doing. Highly adaptable and data-driven, always ensuring work is produced to the highest standard. Ex-DeepMind Research team.
Joined Gizmo (AI EdTech, Series A) as the 20th employee, working directly with the founders. Full ownership of Gizmo's business operations, including Finance, Legal, Strategy & Ops, People & Recruitment, Office Management and special projects, plus oversight of our Customer Support function.
Joined Moonvalley (Video GenAI, Seed → Acquisition) as the 30th employee, working with the Chief Scientific Officer and wider C-Suite to support our AI researchers and grow Moonvalley's AI capabilities. • Saved $25M on compute spend over 3 years compared to the next best offer (and $73M cheaper than the first proposal we received) by identifying and negotiating an extended partnership opportunity, which also introduced $20+M in new revenue opportunities for Y1 of the partnership • Saved $5M in data acquisition costs over 3 months through successful negotiations with large data providers • Complete ownership of our ethical data acquisition pipeline, from sourcing through to negotiation and legal contracting, ensuring our mission-critical value to respect and compensate creatives is never compromised • Identified and ran in-depth assessments with 20+ data providers in first 6 weeks at Moonvalley • Invited to speak on panels at AI in Film conferences (e.g. AI on the Lot) and VFX events, to discuss the importance of ethics in AI and the technical requirements for training models on smaller, fully licensed datasets • Scoped and led a major model conditioning project in month one at Moonvalley, which spanned our research, infra, product and human annotation teams, including defining our research requirements and drawing initial wireframes for the UI to ensure accurate and consistent data collection • Built and ran a scalable system to collect qualitative and quantitative data to gather feedback from all 21 AI team members, in order to assess team productivity over time and highlight opportunities for continued improvement • Updated our stand-up and team sync call structure, decreasing time spent by ~70% and enabling productive team discussions, leading to a ~100% increase in completion rates • Interviewed 15+ researcher and operational candidates to augment our growing team • Worked with the People team to shortlist, view and select our new London office
Joined Heron Data (AI FinTech, Seed → Series A) as the 6th employee, working directly with the CEO as a hands-on operator, driving cross-department initiatives and building out the Customer Success function. • Co-led a 200% improvement of our MoM gross profit over 3 months across Eng, Product and CS departments, far exceeding our goal to maintain gross profit during significant company change and product flux • Drove our product roadmap, by working very closely with Engineering, Support and Sales to collect, analyse and understand customer feedback and product issues • Saved ~8 hours of employee time per week by automating processes using Hubspot (CRM), Vitally (CS tool), Unthread (Support tool) and Zapier (automations tool), also enabling timely flags for revenue growth opportunities • Scoped and ran detailed NRR and churn data analyses, revealing a significant issue among our earlier cohort customers. Ultimately renewed 95% of those at-risk • Boosted our sales and marketing materials, by writing and publishing 3 case studies in my first 3 months at Heron • Spear-headed our customer data strategy, driving the implementation of Health Scoring, NPS surveys and product usage tracking, enabling us to much better predict and prevent churn • Ensured automatic minimum NRR improvement of + 105-112% YoY, further increasing to +125% with proactive CS interventions, by implementing and running Heron's contract renewals process • Offered all of our employees meaningful employee benefits, by evaluating and selecting impactful partners, including Spill.chat for talking therapy • Reinforced our high-energy and supportive team culture by organising quarterly team socials and events • Increased the number of customers with a ‘Healthy’ score by 48% in 2 months through proactive CS engagement • Improved Time to First Response by 900% within 1 month of taking full ownership of Support • Streamlined processes by building onboarding, renewal and upsell playbooks
Joined DeepMind (AI Research, Enterprise, bought by Google) and enabled the Research function at DeepMind to improve the structure and processes around their work, producing successful novel collaborations and increasing productivity. • Cut project delivery timelines by 33% through implementation of program management tools, enabling the team to better schedule and manage dependencies • Increased committed membership of the DeepMind Research Science Portfolio by 81 % by running interactive community events, defining a clear mission and setting directional goals for the group to work collaboratively on • Worked with the Science Council to assess and enhance the business strategy, community and collaboration efforts across the Portfolio (254 members) • Enabled and delivered 6+ technical projects and company-wide efforts within the Frontiers, Learning at Scale and Cognition research teams • Facilitated and structured projects with external academic collaborators • Coached team members to help guide their professional development and achieve career goals • Co-hosted the Introduction to Neuroscience course
Joined Raft, pka Vector AI (ML FreightTech, Seed → Series A) to establish the Customer Team as the 15th employee, working directly with the CTO. • Grew to manage a team of 4 • Drove a 300% increase in trial conversions in 3 months (Q1 2021), working very closely with Engineering and Product to focus on product improvements and driving onboarding efficiencies • Worked cross-functionally to outline and prioritise the product development roadmap in the run-up to our Series A raise • Pitched and set-up a new product walkthrough, feedback collection and analysis tool (Pendo), to drive data-driven decision making and customer action plans • Project managed the rollout and extensive testing for our new beta product, managing customer expectations and time pressure, maintaining positive relationships throughout • Built the customer journey from Sales handover through renewal & upsell, including all template documentation • Organised and delivered regular customer release notes, to update customers on our fast-developing product and how to use new features