Simon Mosk-Aoyama

I joined PlayHaven as Head of Product, and began by focusing the team on roadmap and execution.

Less and three months into my tenure we merged with Kontagent and formed Upsight, where I moved to Head of Operations. In this role I managed across teams, with revenue/sales ops, IT, customer support, and dev ops in my group.

I joined the CBS Interactive Games group in late 2011 which included the media properties of GameSpot and GameFAQs.

• Helped acquire and integrate the GiantBomb & ComicVine properties & team
• Managed fluid team of up to 40 on-site and remote team-members
• Helped shape staff headcount to make this $40M annual business opex profitable while increasing development output
• Began as VP Engineering, took over Product, Design, and Community
• Hired staff to ensure the highest growing property had no single points of failure
• Staffed team and lead re-build of acquired sites GiantBomb ComicVine on a fresh tech platform (symfony2, php, MySQL) and used it as a base for the re-write of GameSpot, which launched shortly after I departed in 2013.

The Usual was restaurant ordering business (akin to GrubHub or Eat24). Our key differentiator was our restaurant tablet, which allowed restaurants to respond to orders and provide better communication to customers about their orders.

I joined after the V1 product has been built via outsourced engineering, so I came on as both first developer and VP of engineering, and I standardized our platform on django (I learned most of my Python here), and hired two awesome engineers.

Unfortunately our funding dried up in late 2011 and The Usual is no more.

I built lots of interesting prototypes and proof of concepts with a partner as we developed mobile & other startup ideas.

Joined as head of engineering for this small (~10-person) vc-backed startup that began as Wello - we built a browser-based toolbar that allowed you to surf the web with your friends and share where you were at all times online.

As the team contracted I dug in and helped re-write out back-end server in java/xmpp and became the leader of this small team as we pitched to a panel at the last techcrunch 50 conference.

Alas, Hark in its old form no longer exists, but the domain I helped acquire lives on as our former vc took the domain and repurposed it with the best darn audio-clip site on the web!

Managed the algorithmic search production engineering group, with teams in Santa Clara & Bangalore.

The team provided production/operations engineering for Yahoo! Search, Answers, Delicious, and a number of other search properties.

I helped build great web & physical products for Zazzle as the only engineering Program Manager. In this role I wore a lot of hats, including managing a partnership with The Picture People, running photo shoots with the Model Shots (images on a shirt!) project, and helped print any kind of product during holiday crunch time.

Helped build many products for Ask.com in the development team, including the original Smart Answers product, directhit.com, MyJeeves/MyAsk, and the syndication platform.

I wore a lot of different hats at Ask in my 6 year tenure, including developer, manager of development for syndication, program manager, manager of the program management group, and director of data engineering. The most important thing I did was help build world class search products and hire the future CTO and head of M&A.

Helped build the selfcare.com e-commerce web site - we were going to be the Amazon of Wellness sites!

Selfcare.com was build on Microsoft SiteServer Commerce edition so I wrote a lot of VBScript/ASP and a lot of SQL Server queries.