RS

Ray Shan

VP Product @ Carta. Building SaaS that scales next-gen startups.

San Francisco, California

Work Experience

2024

  • Vice President of Product Management

    2024

  • Founding Member, Standards Author

    2020

    The Open Cap Table Coalition gives the power and control of equity data back to their true owners: the startups and shareholders. 49+ top law firms, equity management platforms, and other startup ecosystem players come together to improve the interoperability, transparency, and portability of equity data. My team at LTSE conceived and drove the formation of the coalition. I represented LTSE and Carta as a member of the Technical Working Group, and co-authored v1 of the Open Cap Table Format industry standard.

2022 - 2024

  • Vice President of Product Management

    2022 - 2024

    “LatAm’s answer to Plaid.” — Mary Ann Azevedo, TechCrunch Belvo democratizes financial services in Latin America. Every month, we help tens of millions of consumers and businesses borrow, pay and hone smarter financial behavior by powering hundreds of apps in their financial life. We are the leading Open Finance platform with the strongest network effect (direct banking and payment rail connections for 80% of bankable population), biggest logos (Nubank, MercadoLibre), and our Top-20 API ranked among leading developer platforms like Stripe and Salesforce.   As a member of the Executive Team, I lead our Product Org (Product Management, Design and Data Science).

2017 - 2023

  • Advisor

    2022 - 2023

  • Senior Director of Product Management, Head of Product

    2019 - 2022

    “Silicon Valley's most important startup for other startups.” — Dan Primack, Axios At LTSE, we help companies build a long-term foundation, do good and get credit for doing good. For young startups, we do this with LTSE Equity, an equity management platform used by 32,000 companies to fundraise and reward their stakeholders. For established companies, we do this with The Long-Term Stock Exchange, where farsighted companies like Asana and Twilio hold themselves accountable to a higher standard and share their prosperity broadly.   I joined as employee #11 to build from zero to one: stand up complex systems, find product-market fit, built Product Management and Design while executing in parallel.

  • Director of Product Management

    2017 - 2019

2015 - 2017

  • Head of Engineering (interim)

    2016 - 2017

  • Director of Product Management

    2015 - 2017

    "Process and connect [data] at a pace and scale way beyond human capabilities." — Ian Bannerman, Managing Director at Taylor & Francis Yewno is an AI company that transforms information into knowledge. We built an AI platform to help people discover new ideas, answer questions, and build models. Our platform served researchers around the world at tier-1 universities like Stanford and Tsinghua and top financial services firms like Nasdaq and Deutsche Börse. To do this, we curated large structured and unstructured datasets from leading publishers like Springer Nature and FactSet, then trained neural networks to extract knowledge graphs that powered our search and data products. As a member of the Executive Team, I built Yewno's Product Management / Design org and served as an interim Head of Engineering. My team found product-market fit with an academic search product. We identified new opportunities to further monetize our technology by expanding to a new vertical: finance. We build domain-specific knowledge graphs, then used them to build an equity research platform and alternative data feed products. We solved hard data problems like multimodal, multilingual and real-time ingestion pipelines, and data governance with granular rights management. We experimented with new ways to interact with data and AI: GPU-accelerated data visualization like Figma and question answering like ChatGPT. Under my leadership, we grew: - SaaS WAU by 20x, serving 260k users - Training data by 4x from 30M to 120M documents - Knowledge graph entities by 10x to 50M

  • Lead Software Engineer

    2014 - 2016

    Apple builds powerful tools like Xcode and Cocoa to help developers to building polished, human apps. For web developers, our team of Apple and NeXT alums built a similar developer platform based on our open-source front-end framework. On top of this foundation, we built a cloud-based IDE with a visual canvas for building UI with low-code like Webflow.   My impact: - Differentiation: As the Tech Lead for our animation module, defined a strategy that differentiated our open-source front-end framework on performance. Designed and built systems that rendered chainable, state/phase-based animations at 60 FPS. This feature contributed to us outperforming Angular, Google’s widely-used framework. - Network effect: Built new multiplayer features into the IDE. Enabled designers and developers to collaboratively craft products with modular components and live, multi-device preview. - Monetization: as the Tech Lead for professional services, led embedded engineering teams at our customers like Google to validate product hypothesis and monetize our products. Built multi-platform apps from a single codebase, such as AMD Looking Glass, an app that uses AI computer vision models to search videos based on facial and object recognition. Apps built on Montage served millions of users. Montage Studio was acquired by Tenefit.

2013 - 2015

  • Data Science Manager, Growth

    2013 - 2015

    Shutterfly is a direct-to-consumer e-commerce brand with billions in revenue, comparable to Peloton and Wish. I improved our experimentation platform, which includes our forecasting and attribution models, allowing us to run experiments across our 8 growth channels (direct, SEO, paid marketing, etc.) Managing up, Shutterfly Leadership used my team's work to make investment decisions and to communicate to Wall Street. Aligning down, I worked with PMs and channel managers to set goals, identify levers, design and execute experiments. During my time, we grew revenue by 18% and increased Return on Ad Spend by double digits.

2010 - 2013

  • Data Science Manager, Product & GTM

    2010 - 2013

    Entrust secures identities. We built both the software, our identity and access management platform, and the hardware, room-sized machines that print passports and the Square Cash Card. Chances are something in your wallet and your computer was made with our product, no matter where you are in the world. My team built our product strategy informed by data. To perform analysis at scale, we built our data engineering infrastructure from the ground up and aggregated data across functions like sales and product. We partnered with the C-level team and product managers to build long-term strategies aligned on our mission. These strategies guided our resource allocation and day-to-day execution.

2008 - 2010

  • Cofounder, Head of Product & Technology

    2008 - 2010

    Holy Cow designed and produced organic clothing that’s healthier for people and the planet. I cofounded the direct-to-consumer brand and built our vision and products. My impact: - Growth: found product-market fit measured by positive Return on Ad Spend in our e-commerce channel, and distribution across 60 doors in 3 countries at retailers like Nordstrom and Whole Foods in our wholesale channel. - Product & tech: designed and built a custom e-commerce store and supply chain tracking software that enabled each garment to be traceable from farm to store.

2007 - 2009

  • Assistant VP, Customer Acquisitions (Growth)

    2007 - 2009

    In the highly competitive and saturated credit card business, HSBC was the largest non-prime issuer in the U.S. with $12B assets and 11M customers. I was part of its Customer Acquisition team that acquired 1.8M consumers in 2008. To optimized for 5-year LTV / CAC ($125M marketing budget), I identified levers (customer segmentation, product features, pricing, channels, creatives, etc.), and ran product experiments. This was my first machine learning role: defining credit risk policies by training and validating supervised regression models for loss forecasting, and unsupervised clustering models for user segmentation. Our U.S. card business was acquired by Capital One in 2011.