My mini-bio is above, so check that out if you’re just curious about the high level. If you’re interested in the details, keep on reading!
I’m a software engineer and product builder at heart, which has shaped the unusual way my career has progressed. I don’t say unusual lightly. I spent almost 15 years at ESPN + Disney, but in 3 different stints. In between, I went to startups (either my own or joining others’). Prior to that, I worked in an R&D team at a mid-sized software company, and several other startups. I’m not your typical process and spreadsheet executive, though I can do those things, too.
The consistent theme throughout my career is a relentless focus on building great products, usually in new technology or emerging paradigms. This isn’t just about the startups - each time I joined ESPN/Disney I came on to be part of or lead a new initiative. I helped build the first League Manager platform at ESPN, introduced realtime updates to ESPN.com before websockets were a thing, created ESPN’s mobile engineering team, relocated to India for 2 years and globalized the ESPN content platform, and finally helped drive the creation of new personalization systems for live television.
Throughout those jobs, we dealt with the unique traffic and scaling needs of ESPN’s products. A breaking news push notification basically works like a self-triggered DDOS attack, for example. The whole audience comes back to update their fantasy roster between 12:30 and 1PM ET every Sunday during Fantasy Football season. March Madness is truly madness from a traffic standpoint.
ESPN also runs one of the most sophisticated newsrooms in the country, covering live sports around the world in near realtime, for mostly live television. It was exhilarating. Eventually, my remit expanded to all platforms powering the digital products for the media networks at Disney, including ABC, ABC News, National Geographic, the Disney channels, and more.
The startups in between helped me get out of the corporate bubble. At Fanzter, we launched Coolspotters, which had millions of monthly active users, along with a few other products. Most recently at Ohai.ai, I led the creation of the market leading AI personal assistant for families, tackling some tricky problems in LLM accuracy and oversight.
My LinkedIn has a complete rundown of my career along with highlights, but here are some that aren’t there:
- Launched ESPN’s first mobile app, ScoreCenter (now the ESPN app), in 6 months from joining to launch.
- I was on stage for an Apple event - we were the first demo for push notifications. Having the ESPN tones ring out during that event is still a core memory. We also worked with Apple to build for iPad launch, with early access to the hardware.
- Drove the POC and internal evangelization of a personalized SportsCenter POC, maintaining high quality personalization while maintaining the production values of SportsCenter. Disney is now productizing this. This work also resulted in 2 patents.
You can find more of my writing and my socials by following the links at sujal.com.