Danny Roosevelt
Hello! Thanks for checking out my website. My name is Danny Roosevelt and I've lived and worked in San Francisco for the past 7 years or so.
I recently co-founded MailCoach, where we built and shipped 4 different productivity apps to thousands of users at more than 100 companies (more info in the Projects tab below). The overarching goal for all the tools we built was to increase productivity at work.
Before starting MailCoach I spent 5 years in Ad Tech at BrightRoll, where I shipped highly technical products that handled billions of HTTP requests per day and grew revenue by >20%. I authored technical API docs and filed a patent for standardizing interactive mobile video ads.
I'm passionate about technology that is changing people's lives for the better. And I love collaborating with others, but also have a deep respect for me-time. Whenever I can, I love traveling, cooking, learning, golfing, and hacking on fun projects.
Things I love
- Travel. I love to travel, and I'm really fortunate to have spent a decent amount of time exploring new places throughout my life, and especially since leaving my job in 2016. My wife and I spent about 6 weeks driving across the US (check out our route here) in the Fall of 2016, and it was amazing. The United States is stunning, beautiful, and diverse, and I'm eager to explore even more of it.
- Food. I also really love food (looking at it, cooking it, talking about it, and of course eating it). My sabbatical provided a great opportunity to cook more, and J. Kenji López-Alt's latest book, The Food Lab, has been a serious game changer for our culinary adventures at home.
- Technology. I love using and learning about new technology, and I am especially passionate about understanding how technology can positively impact people's lives around the world. I'm an unabashed Apple fanboy and self-professed early adopter.
- Seinfeld. But also West Wing, Breaking Bad, Lost, The Wire, Arrested Development, The Office, Parks and Rec, Game of Thrones, and Westworld (not necessarily in that order, but Seinfeld is obviously #1).
Skills, etc.
- Relentless productivity evangelist and macOS G-Suite power user
- Deep technical understanding of HTTP networking, web traffic communication, browser cookies, etc.
- More than 5 years of experience shipping products across all aspects of digital video advertising
- Extensive experience developing products on top of various mobile SDKs, web APIs, and AWS
- Proficient using SQL, LookML (Looker), HTML, CSS, and React
- Well versed in making killer Excel charts, pivot tables, conditional statements, etc.
- Comfortable and skilled public speaker and presenter
- Conversational French speaker, reader, and writer
- Mediocre golfer and aspiring home chef
Awards
- In January 2016, I received a Service Excellence Award from the regulatory body for the digital advertising industry, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), for work I did with my colleague, to help write and publish a new framework for standardizing best practices for displaying video ads within mobile apps.
- Prior to publishing the MRAID Video Addendum described above, we filed a patent describing the new rules, along with information on how and why developers, designers, and ad tech companies can implement them.
Projects
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Dylan Sather and I started MailCoach at the beginning of 2017. Since then, we built 4 different products that reached thousands of users at more than 100 different companies.
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We've both been passionate about productivity for a long time and were excited to combine our skills building great software at BrightRoll with our love of productivity, when we left Yahoo in 2016.
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Below are some highlights of the different apps we've built since then.
Professional Experience
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MailCoach, Inc.
San Francisco, CA / 2017 - 2018
Co-founder, CEO
Bootstrapped startup that built a suite of tools to improve employee productivity at work and shipped 4 apps to thousands of users at more than 100 different companies.
- Rate That Meeting provided a platform to enable automatic ratings for meetings along with analytics dashboards for C-level executives to analyze and improve the impact of meetings across their org.
- Should It Be a Meeting is a fun and engaging way to figure out if you really need to have another meeting at work, with just a hint of snark.
- MailCoach for email analyzed Gmail usage at work and implemented smart filters programmatically.
- MailCoach for Chrome was a browser Extension that analyzed email productivity and ranked users against their peers at work.
Check out the Projects tab for more info on each product.
Led product strategy and design, marketing, enterprise sales, and front-end web development.
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Roosevelt Consulting
San Francisco, CA / 2016 - 2017
Owner
Advised small to medium-sized technology companies with product expertise, business strategy, and technical guidance.
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Sabbatical
San Francisco, CA / 2016 - 2017
Took 6 months off from the professional workforce to travel and learn new skills, including front-end web development via the completion of this very website (built on Bootstrap and Jekyll, deployed using Cloudformation on AWS).
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Yahoo
San Francisco, CA / 2015 - 2016
Product Manager
Owned the product strategy, execution, and backlog for key features of the BrightRoll and Yahoo tech stacks, including mobile video. Designed and shipped products including migration from Flash to HTML5 video and large-scale user mapping service (>1B requests/day). Built robust reporting dashboards using SQL in Redshift and Looker to monitor product launches, and directly contributed to >20% in revenue growth.
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BrightRoll
San Francisco, CA / 2011 - 2015
Prior to acquisition by Yahoo, BrightRoll was the industry’s leading provider of programmatic video solutions, including a demand side platform and marketplace. These solutions helped advertisers, publishers, and partners grow their business and connect with consumers on web, mobile, and TV. BrightRoll was acquired by Yahoo in December 2014 for $640 million.
Product Manager / 2013 - 2015
Product owner for all things related to mobile video, user mapping, key partner integrations, and proprietary client-side technology, Scout. Grew publisher supply to >3B requests/day with new supply integrations, and implemented platform-wide audience measurement (this was a key differentiator in the market). Defined and authored technical API docs for supply and data integrations.
Designed and led company-wide productivity trainings for all 300+ employees. Thought leader within the company and industry and ran numerous working groups and large-scale public webinars.
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Senior Manager, Mobile Integrations / 2012 - 2013
Developed best practices for partner integrations and formed new team to offload custom API integrations from product and engineering teams. Led on-boarding, testing, troubleshooting, and management of hundreds of API and SDK integrations with new video publishers.
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Senior Manager, Ad Operations / 2011 - 2012
Oversaw quality control, trafficking, and implementation for advertiser videos on BrightRoll’s demand-side platform; drove revenue growth through custom campaign targeting strategies. Regularly delivered creative results with tight deadlines in high pressure sales situations.
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Apple
Los Angeles, CA / 2009 - 2011
Mac Genius
Resolved customer concerns with creative solutions, and excelled at understanding and contributing to company trends and growth. Established strong technical skill-set while maintaining a zen-like demeanor in a demanding customer service environment.
Education
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University of California, Santa Barbara
2005 - 2009
B.A. in Sociology with a minor in French
Member of Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity and Technology Management Program
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Institut d'Études Politiques
Lyon, France / Fall 2008
Completed semester abroad in intensive cultural and language immersion program
Extensive travel throughout Western Europe