Consumer Social and Media Executive Search
Executive search for Media and Consumer Platforms
In consumer, there is no buyer to convince. There is only behaviour to change.
Enterprise software has a procurement process, a champion, and a budget cycle. A consumer product has none of that. Somebody either opens it tomorrow or they do not, and no amount of selling changes that. The work sits in product, engineering, and data rather than in revenue, and the metrics that decide whether the company survives are retention loops and engagement mechanics rather than pipeline.
Media adds a second problem. The buyer and the beneficiary are often different people. A university buys retention and a student experiences a mentor.
An advertiser buys attention and a reader experiences an article. Leaders who optimise only for whoever pays get this wrong in a specific way: they build something the paying party approves of and the using party abandons.
We screen for leaders who have built something people came back to without being asked. That is a narrower group than it sounds, and it is rarely the same group as the one with the most impressive enterprise track record.
SELECTED ENGAGEMENTS
REPRESENTATIVE PLACEMENTS
Chief Technology Officer, AI Products & Development
Cantina Labs
Product and AI development leadership at a consumer social platform, spanning machine learning, personality systems, and the core product. Founded by Sean Parker.
Vice PResident or Product Management
Frame.IO
Product leadership for a tool whose users are professional editors, with strong opinions about workflow and no patience for software that slows them down.
Vice President of Product
ChartBeat
Reporting that editors act on in the moment, at organisations where the wrong metric changes what gets covered.
Head of Design
Frame.IO
Design leadership at a company where the interface is the product and the users are themselves designers.
Senior Director of Creator Strategy
Cantina Labs
A zero-to-one problem: which creators to onboard, and what the economics of a creator-driven AI network even look like.
Related practices
33eleven Partners places Vice President through C-suite leaders at consumer social and media companies.