About

I’m a proven growth and performance marketing leader who has run $100M+ budgets for ZipRecruiter, Uber, and the NFL. I’m also an experienced mentor and manager of talent, especially Millennials. My preferred work challenge involves partnering with a team of smart, creative people while pushing rapid growth and solving hard problems using technology as a positive, disruptive force.

At my core, I’m a guy who was born in New York and raised in California – I like to think of it as having had the best of both worlds. I’m proud of my progressive upbringing and tech-forward principals that have helped guide me to where I am today.

My family is the essence of the American Dream. When my parents immigrated from Israel, my father had $200 dollars in his pocket and my mother had never been on a plane. You wouldn’t know it from looking at them, but they were fighters, having served in the Israeli Army and then navigating the New York City of the 1970s. They had to figure it all out without a lot of help.

My father started his first diamond and jewelry business in Queens. A few years after I was born, we relocated to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. My parent’s hard work, sacrifice, hustle, and resilience made a big impression on my life. The importance of family and having a good education were values they instilled in both me and my younger sister.

At UC Berkeley I received my BA in Business, graduating with High Honors. I worked my way through college, tutoring math and teaching at summer school. For graduate school, I decided to return to my New York City roots and got an MA in Ed Tech from Columbia University. I was on the Dean’s List and received a James Woods Fellowship.

One night after graduation when I was worrying about what my next “perfect” job would be, I had an epiphany. I realized there would be many different opportunities in life – not just one optimal path – and as long as I was learning, good things would happen.

That took a lot of pressure off and allowed me to dabble in startups, doing management consulting, venture capital, and business development. One of the companies I worked with, BigVine, was eventually sold to NBC. My experiences on the sidelines led me to launch several startups on my own including BestBuyEyeglasses, eventually sold to Lens.com.

In 2005, after watching “An Inconvenient Truth,” I became passionate about the climate crisis and decided to develop a company that worked towards the greater good. That was the genius behind Primafuel, a company that provides technology services for the bio-fuel industry. We received the Technology Pioneer Award from the World Economic Forum for our work. This was my first experience with scaling companies, as we grew 9 times in a span of 2 years and raised $17 million dollars. It was acquired by EdeniQ in 2010.

I’m a big sports fan, so being able to work for the NFL was an exciting as well as transformative moment in my career. It was my first real corporate experience, working within a well-oiled global machine. I initially started as the head of marketing and then was asked to also lead their data analytics team.

What the NFL taught me was how to marry the right and left sides of my brain, combining brand marketing with quantitative user acquisition. I learned how to create a cohesive message across nations and platforms. I was able to see how 100 million fans interact with their NFL content, fantasy football team, and other digital properties.

I loved my time at the NFL but knew I wanted to work with an innovative startup and help them expand their market. That’s why I targeted Uber, who were not as well known back then, and became their general manager for Southern California.

Uber gave me a chance to really hone both my operational and managerial skills. I ran everything from driver on-boarding to public affairs, launching the first UberEats city as well as UberPOOL, UberLUX UberESPANOL, and Uber Wheelchair Accessible vehicles; my team was also asked to launch Uber Las Vegas and Uber Portland. In my first year we added 100,000 Uber drivers to Los Angeles – 50 times the number of cabs that had existed there for 40 years. It was crazy, but it was a rush, working with ambitious, smart, hard-working people and changing the face of modern transportation.

Since it was a startup, I found myself managing a lot of Millennials. But the things they are often knocked for – entitlement, ambition, restlessness – I think are positive. Therefore, I built an organizational structure and culture that encouraged change and made sure there was an organic growth path for high achievers.

When I arrived, people were working individually or managing teams of up to 12 people, even if it was their first time. I helped flip that on its head, having them manage smaller teams earlier in their careers, giving them an opportunity to grow while helping Uber to scale rapidly. This org chart strategy was adopted by operations teams for thousands of employees across the USA. 

After Uber I went to Ziprecruiter, which gave me a chance to help scale and reinvent an already existing brand. I had a hand in transforming them from a middle-of-the-road job platform into one of the top career sites with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. I’m especially proud that we have been able to help so many people using the platform find a job with better hours, benefits, and earnings. 

When hiring, I tend to not look at prior experience; what is more important to me are the skill sets and, ultimately, the people themselves. Because of my unconventional practices I brought many engineers along with consultants, financial, and creative folks into the marketing department, building from there.

When managing a team, I run things almost like a hedge fund or war room, with thousands of lines of spreadsheet code laid out. I’m very much a quant data nerd yet I know how to never lose sight of a brand. As a result, I’ve been able to grow organizations very quickly.

There are essentially two aspects to what I do. Performance marketing is about allocating dollars across various channels including television and online. I’m pretty good at spotting new trends in technology and riding that wave. For example, I was fortunate to identify the podcast trend early and became one of the largest advertisers in that space.

The other side is managing talent and team building. I’m able to rapidly recruit, train, mentor, and retain great talent. For me this is the most fun, watching people push through their limits and help accelerate their career.

Currently, I’m on a “working sabbatical,” traveling and living with my wife, son, and daughter in Tel Aviv. It’s a great way to reconnect with our family’s roots and spend time appreciating the smaller things in life.

But I’m always on the lookout for the next entrepreneurial challenge, especially companies that fulfill what I call my triple bottom line: making money, doing good, and saving the planet.