Jonathan Sandlund

Senior Product Manager, Learning

2024

Sabbatical: Volunteering, Learning, Consulting

2023 - 2024

Volunteering, exploring personal and professional curiosities, and tinkering and consulting on AI-related projects. Consulting / Projects: - Your Next Work Chapter by Waverly Creations: Collaborating on the development of an AI-assisted, self-guided version of Raj Bhargava's "Design Your Next Life Chapter" Stanford Continuing Studies course, which I had the great pleasure of taking! https://www.yournextworkchapter.com - TownSquare: Exploring how AI might might help cultivate vibrant digital public spaces and discourse. Volunteering: - U.S. Digital Response PM fellowship: Leveraging customer feedback, helping develop new features that smooth and improve USDR's Federal Grant Finder tool: https://www.usdigitalresponse.org/grant/grant-finder - Full Circle Fund fellowship: Assisting Edgewood Center for Children and Families in creating an internal knowledge base that can support the growth of their new "A Place to Begin" program: https://edgewood.org/a-place-to-begin/ Learning: - Exploring curiosities and interesting across Religion, Philosophy, Leadership & Management, Programming, and AI through a mix of online and offline courses and materials.

Senior Product Manager II

2022 - 2023

Led the Growth Acquisition and Core Learning Experience Pods for 2.5 and 0.5 years, respectively. Partnering and co-creating with a group of exceptionally talented and mission-driven teammates and stakeholders across Engineering, Design, User Research, Data Science, Marketing, Content Strategy, and Partnerships, I was responsible for our Pod's long-term strategy, roadmapping, and execution.

Senior Product Manager I, Growth

2020 - 2022

Coursera envisions a future where everyone has access to a world-class education. We aim to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.

Senior Product Manager, Head of Investing

2016 - 2019

* In a PM/GM role, led the cross-functional Investing team to grow traffic ~2x and organic revenue >4x ($15M+) over 3 years. We became the largest U.S. marketplace for shopping online brokerage and investment advisory products and helped 15M+ consumers a year make smarter investment decisions. Responsible for product and business strategy, annual and quarterly planning & roadmapping, and execution. * Led 5-member platform product team that, alongside two other awesome platform teams and many cross-functional partners, envisioned, designed, built and migrated 150+ of NW's highest traffic and revenue products across multiple verticals to a shared marketplace platform, delivering a more consistent and delightful shopping experience to consumers, standardizing product analytics and analysis, accelerating time to market, and enabling cross-team feature development. * Managed partnerships with major financial institutions (Ally, TD Ameritrade, Wealthfront, etc.) end-to-end, including pricing, forecasting, performance management. Negotiated higher pricing with top partners to achieve industry-leading CPAs. NerdWallet's marketplaces and advisory products help 150M+ consumers a year make smarter financial decisions.

Growth Lead

2014 - 2016

* Defined, led and executed user acquisition and activation strategies, helping grow CircleUp into one of the largest networks of verified accredited investors in the world (30,000+). * Scaled paid acquisition ~5x while reducing avg. CAC by 40% by continuously testing and optimizing new channels, messaging, and landing pages. * Launched and scaled first referral marketing channel by developing and growing adoption of products that helped entrepreneurs identify, engage and acquire investors in their networks. Used to acquire thousands of new investors and generate $5M+ in GMV. * Increased activation KPI (signup to deal room) by ~2x by successfully A/B testing and deploying improvements to the first-time user experience and onboarding email campaigns * Defined and executed the retail GTM strategy for CircleUp's first private equity index fund. Worked closely with product & compliance to develop and test the product's LP and digital marketing materials. Segmented and marketed users through a mix of targeted email campaigns and webinars to successfully raise $4M+. CircleUp is an online private equity marketplace that connects professional investors to innovative consumer companies. It's helped Consumer entrepreneurs raise more than $300M since 2012.

Founder

2012 - 2014

Bootstrapped TheCrowdCafe into the leading provider of data & research on the global investment crowdfunding industry. * (Naively) wore many hats, from coding and writing to SEO, public speaking, and sales. Eventually delegated some functions, but not soon enough. Lesson learned. * With a little skill and a lot of luck (timing), dominated SEO for all things "equity crowdfunding". Business model: free inbound leads on the front-end; generated revenue by selling proprietary data, research and site sponsorships on the back-end. * Aggregated, wrangled, analyzed and published industry data to promote greater understanding of the investment crowdfunding industry and its potential. (Unfortunately, unrealized.) Presented research at 15+ conferences over two years. * Ultimately consider TCC a failed venture. Operating as a solo founder for two years led to burn out. But well worth the cost of admission. I matured tremendously —professionally and personally—and it's undoubtedly made me a more effective operator. Adversity is a great teacher. * As part of my employment agreement with CircleUp, I stopped work on TCC. The domain has since been sniped by a content farm. Waybackmachine to the rescue, here's an archived snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20161029185121/http://www.thecrowdcafe.com/

Analyst

2011 - 2012

Capital placements, M&A and operations advisory for emerging growth companies. Sector-focused on retail and e-commerce. Selected transaction: Equity placement for $50M+ direct-to-consumer e-commerce company • Built transaction & operating models for client. Wrote scripts to ingest Google Analytics data into the operating model to automate the update of traffic, conversion rate and revenue forecasts by channel (Organic Search, Paid, Referral, Social, Direct, Email). • Prepared PPM, decks and management presentations. • Identified and communicated with key potential investors.

Intern, Micro-Cap Fund

2010 - 2010

A private equity pioneer in the micro-cap space; invests in North American companies with up to $5m in EBITDA. * Assisted fund analysts in due diligence of potential acquisitions * Completed competitive analysis of the B2B SaaS market

Equity Analyst

2010 - 2010

•Completed fundamental research on small-cap equities and high-yield debt - Bloomberg certified; used to build equity screens and run portfolio regressions - Built DCF and trading comp. models •Distilled analyses into internal and external (client-friendly) equity reports

Founder

2009 - 2010

Evolved from my blogging on micro-cap equities. Formalized after I passed the Series 65. I put my writing on hiatus when I started my internship with Fogel Neale Securities. • Conduit for my investment views, strategies and ramblings • Applied Graham & Dodd value framework to micro-cap equities • Analyzed micro-caps with upside > 3x downside • Upside* = best-case scenario DCF; Downside* = .7x conservatively calculated liquidation value *Estimated, of course ; )