Most modern business knowledge is trapped in the heads of a small group of frontier leaders working on the fastest-growing companies. They go from operating role to operating role, not being able to take the time to pause and synthesize what they know to pass it on. As a result, unless you are one of the few lucky people to work closely with these frontier leaders, that knowledge tends to remain trapped.
One of the core pillars to Reforge is to un-trap this knowledge. That's why in 2019 we created an Executive-In-Residence program. As leaders in the industry think about their next role, the EIR program gives them the time to explore, a platform to build their professional brand, a network, and more. For Reforge Members it is an opportunity to interact and learn from the best in the industry.
Our initial group of EIR's included Bangaly Kaba (Ex-Head of Growth at Instagram, Instacart), Elena Verna (Growth Advisor at Miro, MongoDB, Netlify), Fareed Mosavat (Ex-Dir Product Growth at Slack), Ravi Mehta (ex-CPO at Tinder), and Adam Grenier (ex-Head of Growth Marketing at Uber).
We are excited to announce a number of new additions to this group:
Joanna Lord: ex-CMO at Skyscanner, ClassPass
Crystal Widjaja: ex-SVP Growth and BI at Gojek
Erika Warren: ex-VP Product & Strategy at Wyzant
Dor Levi: ex-EVP Transit, Bikes, Scooters at Lyft
Valerie Wagoner: CGO at GoPay, VP International at Credit Karma
In addition to the EIR's we started an Operator In Residence program for those earlier in their career. We are excited to welcome these new OIRs:
Zainab Ghadiyali: ex-Product Lead at Airbnb
Anne Lewandowski: ex-Product Lead, Growth at Apartment List
Scott Tousley: Head of User Acq at HubSpot
You can learn more from these group by becoming a Reforge Member. As of Spring 2021 we have ten programs across product management, growth, and marketing. Learn more about being an EIR or an OIR.
Reforge’s New Executives in Residence
Joanna Lord
Joanna was most recently the CMO of Skyscanner, a leading travel player, where she led Global Marketing, Regional Marketing, Brand, Product Marketing, Growth Product, Engineering, and Creative. She helped scale the company to over 100M users a month, led a global rebrand, and launched new product initiatives such as hotels, car hire, and sustainability initiatives. Prior to that she was CMO at ClassPass for four years leading Marketing, Brand, Creative, Product Marketing, and key strategic initiatives like pricing updates, corporate communications, a global rebrand, and market expansion strategy.
"I'm currently exploring new opportunities. My discovery is mostly focused on exploring CEO/co-founder opportunities, or CMO+ type roles (COO, CGO, CRO) for mission-driven companies focused on helping people live their best, healthiest, and most fulfilled lives. In the last year, I’ve been very active as a public board director, an independent board member, advisor, and consultant. I'm particularly passionate about supporting female-led companies along their journey."
This spring, Joanna will be leading the Marketing Strategy program.
Crystal Widjaja
Crystal was the SVP of Growth and Business Intelligence at Gojek, the largest on-demand marketplace in Southeast Asia, where she helped accelerate growth over 1000x to tens of millions of transactions per day.
Crystal led Business Intelligence, Performance Marketing, and the Growth Product, Engineering, and Business teams that were responsible for powering the super app’s discovery feed, experimentation engine, and customer data platforms across a 3-sided marketplace of driver supply, merchant supply, and customer demand. Crystal is also a Sequoia Scout investor and advisor in companies like Kumu, ABI’s ZX Ventures, and more.
This spring, Crystal will be leading Advanced Growth Strategy and contributing to other programs such as the Growth Series.
Erika Warren
Erika is the former VP of Product & Strategy at Wyzant, a tutoring marketplace that supports millions of students with their learning goals. Erika built the product function from the ground up and led a pivot of the business from in-person K-12 academic tutoring, to an online K-career personal learning platform. She was also an integral part of the deal team that led a successful exit to IXL Learning. Prior to Wyzant, she was a founding member of the product team at GrubHub.
"I'm looking to join a growth stage company focused on slowing climate change. What I love doing is understanding people, figuring out their motivations or problems, and designing solutions for them. On the side, I mentor and advise early stage start-ups around product market fit and building out the org structure. I'm curious and excited to get my hands dirty, and be of service to others driven to make an impact."
This spring, Erika will be helping with the Retention & Engagement Deep Dive.
Dor Levi
Dor was most recently at Uber / Lyft for the past 5 years. At Lyft, he led the bikes, scooters and transit business vertical. He helped transform Lyft from a pure ride share company to a Transportation company and leader in micro-mobility (Bikes, Scooters) in North America. Prior to that, he led the Shared Ride product and Marketplace infrastructure at Lyft (Matching, Dispatching, Health, and select pricing aspects).
"In the last few months, I've been investing and advising while working on a few concepts. I'm extremely passionate about using technology to help organization scale better, HR tech and how to help people manage one of their biggest asset: their career/expertise. I'm also fascinated with innovation in the space of DAOs and learning more and more about the Defi space."
This spring, Dor will be contributing to the Product Strategy and Product Leadership programs.
Valerie Wagoner
Valerie is currently the Chief Growth Officer of GoPay, the payments and financial services platform arm of Gojek. She is responsible for the long-term growth of the issuing (i.e. consumer) side of the payments network. She is accountable for the P&L of the overall business and for setting the product roadmap in partnership with the CTO of GoPay.
Prior to GoPay, she led the zero-to-one launch and growth of International at Credit Karma as VP & GM. She re-accelerated Twitter's user growth, leading product teams as well as cross-functional teams across global markets. She was the Founder & CEO of ZipDial before being acquired by Twitter.
This spring, Valerie will be contributing to Advanced Growth Strategy.
Reforge’s New Operators in Residence
Photo Credit: Bonnie Rae Mill Photography
Zainab Ghadiyali
At Airbnb, Zainab worked on the future of travel with some of the most talented people on the planet. As people manager, Zainab managed product managers across Internationalization, Developer Platform, Cloud Infrastructure and Reliability Engineering teams. Prior to Airbnb, Zainab was a Tech Lead for the Advertiser Growth team at Facebook and conceptualized Facebook's first public health product connecting blood donors with those looking for a blood donor. Zainab is also the co-founder of Wogrammer which was acquired by AnitaB in 2020. For her work in bridging the gender gap in technology, Zainab was listed by Foreign Policy among the Top 100 Global thinkers of 2015.
Zainab recently published The Product Strategy Stack along with Ravi Mehta.
Anne Lewandowski
Anne previously was the Lead Growth PM at Apartment List. She led SEO strategy, driving 100% year over year organic traffic growth. She built out the SEO product team and their experimentation framework. She owned the AB testing roadmap for their user conversion funnel and landing pages, and the flows she worked on doubled their registration rate. She also partnered closely with marketing to unlock cross-functional growth opportunities such as leveraging Apartment List's popular blog as a conversion channel.
"I'm currently partnering with early stage teams as an independent product consultant with a focus on SEO strategy, experimentation roadmaps, and integrating user insights into growth efforts."
Anne recently published The Power User Trap along with Bangaly Kaba and Fareed Mosavat.
Scott Tousley
Scott is the head of marketing for HubSpot’s startup program. Prior, he led the freemium user acquisition strategy team at HubSpot, where they grew 45% YoY growth for 3+ years — sitting at the intersection of marketing, product, and data. He built the first PQL monetization playbook at HubSpot, starting with a test group of 15 sales reps and scaled it to 2,000+ sales reps. He grew HubSpot's service product line (Service Hub) from 0 to 30,000 freemium users and HubSpot's freemium acquisition model globally.
"I will be researching the parallels between B2B subscription models (ex HubSpot, Stripe, Shopify) and B2C subscription models (ex Strava, Alltrails, Headspace)"
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Membership includes participation in a cohort-based program and ongoing access to content from all programs, weekly releases, deep-dive sessions, and a community of vetted peers to help you execute what you learn.