Oliver Roup <oroup@oroup.com>
San Francisco CA 94123oroup.com

Experience

2020 – 2022 Instacart San Francisco, CA
VP of Product for Enterprise. Owner of Enterprise products through corporate transition from consumer to retailer-enablement.
  • Owned multiple products line representing billions in revenue and a significant fraction of gross profit for the entire company.
  • Complete rebuild of product team. Moved retailer NPS score +20 and team health score +45%.
  • Executive sponsor of successful FoodStorm acquisition. Delivered 100% of OKRs and retained entire team since acquisition.
  • Delivered numerous high-stakes platform and customer launches for key partners like Costco, Wegmans, Kroger, and Publix.
2018 – 2019 Sovrn (Acquirer of VigLink) San Francisco, CA
Head of Product Strategy. Reporting to the CEO, Walter Knapp.
  • Applied the data obtained from the commerce business into the display ecosystem including novel work in low-price "micro-bidding" and data profiling. Developed proprietary sales automation tools to drive down the cost of customer acquisition.
  • Assisted integration of VigLink into Sovrn which outperformed all pre-acquisition performance targets.
2009 – 2018 VigLink (Acquired by Sovrn) San Francisco, CA
Sole Founder / CEO. Invented and delivered a set of "supply-side" tools enabling mainstream web publishers to participate in commerce revenue for the first time. VigLink was the first company to apply display advertising techniques incuding realtime bidding and modelling historical purchase behavior to in-content commerce links.
2003 – 2007 Microsoft Redmond, WA
Principal Group Program Manager (Director). Internally recruited by XBOX founder J Allard to start team serving TV and Movie downloads to the XBOX. Built team from scratch including recruiting and management, product design and delivery. Managed team of 35. Prior work shipping numerous entertainment products including Music, Radio and others.

2002 – 2003

Vulcan

Seattle, WA

Research Program Manager. Worked personally for Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen managing various AI, venture diligence and media strategy projects. Managed multiple teams locally and overseas with multi-million-dollar budgets. Presented to DARPA RKF.
2000 – 2002 Echo Networks

San Francisco, CA

Director of Advanced Technology. Sole product manager and core engineer for award-winning online radio product.
Education
2007 – 2009 Harvard Business School Boston, MA
Master of Business Administration. Winner John H. McArthur Canadian Fellowship. 2nd place VCIC competition.
1994 – 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA
Master of Engineering and Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. Paid research assistant at MIT Media Lab. Founder of Hive.
Professional associations, consulting and internships
2020 First Round Capital San Francisco, CA
Angel Track. A community of established operators and founders looking to develop their skills as early-stage investors.
2010 – YPO (Formerly Young Presidents' Organization) San Francisco, CA
Member, Golden Gate Chapter. YPO is a global leadership community of chief executives with members in >130 countries.
2012 – 2016 Performance Marketing Association Camarillo, CA
Board of Directors. Twice-elected board member. Founded publisher recruitment council. Retired by term limit.
2008 – 2009 Founders Fund San Francisco, CA
Associate. First intern. Member of SpaceX deal team. Personally sourced a deal through Series A investment.
Summer 2007 British Broadcasting Corporation London, UK
Consulting Architect. Brought in to course correct iPlayer, a then-struggling 5-year, 200-person software effort.
Technical Skills and Patents
Continued hands-on technologist with production-level skills in systems and network architecture, arbitrage, real-time bidding, Ruby, Rails, Kubernetes and many other technologies. Inventor of more than a dozen patents.
Personal
  Former national champion rower, sailing race coach, avid cyclist and registered yoga teacher. Travel to over 30 countries.