Shariq Rizvi

Board Member

2022

Executive Vice President of Monetization

2018 - 2024

5+ years as member of the senior executive (“SLT”) team at Reddit, comprising the C & EVP-level execs, that helped rebuild the company, all the way to taking it public (NYSE:RDDT) with our March 2024 IPO. Hired by the Co-founder/CEO of Reddit to build up the Ads Monetization engine. Throughout my 5+ years, I have been the foremost authority at the company for digital advertising product & technology and one of the top-3 leaders for Reddit’s revenue generation efforts. Built a powerhouse team of word-class talent spanning Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, Adtech, product management, Data science, Design and more. Architected & sponsored strategic M&A to grow the business. Led the creation of Reddit’s Ads platform that serves some of the largest advertisers in the world (and delivers $1 Billion revenue runrate for the company) by leveraging high-performance & scalable distributed systems and state-of-art Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning models. Co-created the ads business strategy & helped shape our Go-to-Market engine on the way to $1 Billion revenue run-rate. This includes our approach to serving Large/Medium/Small advertisers, US & international market segments, ROI-driven performance advertising, auction-based ad pricing and more. Interviewed and helped close multiple fellow senior executives for the company: Chief Product Officer, Chief People & Culture Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Financial Officer. Co-created career ladders for multiple functions and defined + influenced various leadership principles at the company. Mentored dozens of senior people leaders. Helped the overall business navigate key inflection points: 2020 COVID crisis, 2022-23 equity market reset (pressure to get to profitability faster), consumer privacy landscape changes impacting digital advertising & more.

Co-founder & COO

2016 - 2018

Partnered with a brilliant team coming out of University of Pennsylvania's Computer Science department, to commercialize their research in declarative/software-defined networking (SDN). Netsil pioneered the universal observability and monitoring platform for modern cloud applications (built using microservices, containers, Kubernetes). Built a strong team across product, marketing and sales. Closed the first deal for the company (a Fortune 500 customer) and then helped the sales team close all early customers. Acquired by Nutanix (NASDAQ:NTNX) to complement Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud Operating System with application visibility/reliability/performance, security and insights.

Co-founder of Performance Ads Business / Director of Engineering

2012 - 2016

As one of the most senior leaders on the Ads team, helped with establishing Twitter as a key player in the digital advertising space, growing Twitter's revenue to $2+ Billion in ~5 years and in taking the company public with a November 2013 IPO. Co-founded the Performance Ads (Direct Response) business at Twitter and built out the Performance Ads team from scratch into a powerhouse team. We launched multiple Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning driven products and grew the Performance Ads revenue from zero to ~$1 Billion in 3 years. Co-led diligence for multiple strategic acquisitions and post-M&A integrations (TapCommerce, TellApart, Bluefin, MoPub). Interviewed hundreds of candidates to enable Twitter's hyper-growth and mentored dozens of them post-hire.

Co-founder and VP of Engineering

2008 - 2012

Co-founded Dasient in 2008. Dasient was backed by Silicon Valley's leading venture capital firms: Google Ventures, FLOODGATE & Benhamou Global Ventures and also an august list of angel investors, led by Reese Schonfeld, the co-founder of CNN. I co-architected the company's business strategy, products and teams. Dasient introduced one of the first commercial systems for detecting web-based malware (including malvertising through malicious ads) by using instrumented virtual machines and browsers running at large scale on distributed clusters. Dasient's customer base included online ad networks (2 of the top-5 in the world), online publishers (a top-5 news site in the world), and leading financial institutions (a top-2 US bank). Acquired by Twitter in 2012 to power the security for its online advertising system.

Software Engineer

2006 - 2008

Early engineer on the original Google Webserver (GWS) team. GWS is the frontend to Google's main web search product and processes all search queries on their way into the Google infrastructure. Worked on the many engineering challenges of GWS, across scalability, availability & security. Tech lead of the Google calculator product. Early engineer on Google App Engine, one of the world's first Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Now expanded and available as the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Mentored new engineers and interviewed 100+ product managers and engineers to support Google's hyper-growth.