Russell Foltz-Smith
Overview
A revenue-driven executive focused on creating exceptional user experiences and profit. Excels at time-to-market delivery and redefinition or folding of stale products. Specialist in traffic acquisition, ambient find-ability and behavioral analysis of users. Executes using technical, financial and pragmatic approaches to fulfill company business objectives. Concurrently provided companies with product development involved in
- Analytics and Yield Management
- Economics and Econometrics
- Traffic Optimization including SEO
- Enterprise Content Management
- Behavioral Science and User Interaction
- Technology Personnel Management
Experience
Principal and Lead Technology Researcher - Co-Founded 1999
Crossroads Access, LLC, The Woodlands, TX
- Co-founder of product development and research company specializing in applying an experimental analysis of behavior to software, organizational development and user activities
- Provide traffic acquisition, yield management and product development services to several large web focused companies
- Serve as Interim executives for clientele during M&A transitions
- Partial client list include: Reunion.com, AmericanGreetings.com, Maxim.com/AlphaMediaGroup, eHarmony, FastChannel Networks, X Prize Foundation, Verio Inc, HFMUS
Vice President, Technology 2005-2007
Purevideo Networks, El Segundo, CA
- Founding team member for a Softbank Capital funded media company
- Lead research and development for five large web 2.0 projects with eight person team that generated sites including PureVideo.com, StupidVideos.com and GrindTV.com
- Engineered initial infrastructure, front end platform, back end media management systems, ad server and all internal information systems
- February 2007 top 10 growing networks according to comScore
- 8 direct reports
Vice President, Product Development 2004-2005
Business.com, Santa Monica, CA
- Enlivened and recharged an aging search engine and directory with a focus on usability. A 421% percent increase in traffic resulted from my teams new search products, community tools and advanced taxonomy
- Created first pay for performance job advertising engine and drove month-over-month traffic from 40K unique users to 500K users on work.com
- Developed new approach to business search engine focusing on semantics and keyword clustering
- Built unique taxonomy organized by intent
- Invented AI feedback loop that learns to take users to bypass search results and go to most relevant information
- 10 direct reports
Director, Business Intelligence 2003-2004
Citysearch.com/IAC, Los Angeles, CA
- Held a series of rapidly advancing management and customer-facing positions during tumultuous period of growth and redefinition
- Awakened the imagination of customers and employees through business intelligence and new product development
- Integrated newly created customer and advertising infrastructure in support of $43MM in annual sales
- Directed all analysis teams and efforts to combine financial, marketing, product, sales and operational performance data in one system and one group
- Integrated custom enterprise web metrics solution into CRM and financial applications in 60 days
- Engineered groundbreaking traffic management algorithms and system models producing 20% improvement in Search Engine Marketing revenue.
- Created the Office of Business Intelligence
- Brokered several valuable traffic sharing deals within online travel space
- 5 direct reports
Sr. Product Manager 2002-2003
Citysearch.com/IAC, Los Angeles, CA
- Lead product development person of InterActiveCorp’s Local Pay For Performance Advertising Engine (patent pending)
- Completed Citysearch’s advertising product overhaul and rollout in 90 days
- Responsible for a 200%n user acquisition growth in six months
- Innovator responsible for development of Citysearch.com’s Panorama, a Customer Relationship Management application
- Reduced fulfillment cycles of all products from 27 days to 48 hours
- Created products and propelled teams that led to growth from 8,000 to 29,000 customers in less than a year while improving service levels
Developer 2000-2001
Yahoo!, Santa Monica, CA
- Design and engineer sales and marketing production projects
- Lead developer on first generation ad systems for Yahoo! Music
Publications
- DRM and Behavior; Russell Foltz-Smith and Pat Price- Verio Inc., 2007 (soon to be published)
- Reverse Logistics Web Services; Russell Foltz-Smith, 2000, About.com Logistics Section
Patents
- ”System for organizing advertisements on a web page and related method”, Citysearch/IAC 2005, Patent App No: 20050216547
Education
BA Mathematics, University of Chicago, Chicago.
Additional Concentration in Statistics and Theater
Personal
- Married, two children.
- Voracious reader who devours new ideas and concepts quickly
- An entrepreneur’s spirit with an investor’s impatience
- Personal pursuits include racquetball, pick-up basketball, collecting TI calculators, and a wide scope of pure and applied research
ENTP
Russell,
I enjoyed your blog on internet video advertising and like the way you think. I am an entrepreneur seeking to start a company developing technology to make it easy to bring internet content to the connected TV set. Clearly a business model I am looking at is enablement of targeted advertising for premium video content; but like you I do think there’s a lot of money chasing this market (as in mobile content) with returns that are hard to measure.
Would you be amenable to a phone call? I’d like to tell you what I’m looking to do and would appreciate your feedback.
PS - a little about me. I spent 10 years at Microsoft, the last 3 I spent in the Digital Media Division helping to build the business for Windows Media Audio and DRM. Until the end of 2007 I was with Passalong Networks, a digital music distribution platform. In my MS days, I used to work with Curtis Beck, whom you must know from Purevideo.