I build technology products, companies, and teams. Mostly with code and lots of data. Usually successfully.
Details available in my CV.
Since 2023, I’ve been VP Product at Blackpanda, Asia’s premier cybersecurity, incident response, and cyberinsurance startup, democratizing these capabilities across companies in APAC.
From 2020 to 2023, I was Global VP Data of Delivery Hero, the world’s 3rd largest food delivery company at €30B+ annually. I remotely ran our three-continent team. Our group led global Data Platforms, Data Science and Machine Learning, MarTech, Fraud, Governance, and Operations for 74 countries on 4 continents, and across 7M+ daily orders. We focused on solving thorny cross-domain and platform issues for our global companies. Those solutions often need healthy doses of data science, engineering ingenuity, compute, and fancy math.
Before DH, I was VP Data at Traveloka, SE Asia’s $5B travel unicorn, growing us to a 125+ person team leading Platforms, Data Science, Machine Learning, and Analytics. We rapidly transformed the team from a simple BI and reporting concern to a modern data science and machine learning group, delivering impactful production models, insights, and capabilities at scale worth millions to the company.
Previously, I was Managing Director of venture builder Pivotal Labs/Neo Innovation APAC. I anchored and led the technical and commercial turnaround of APAC, growing us into the largest and most profitable region globally which resulted in our Feb 2016 acquisition by Dell/VMWare. We built and scaled a fistful of lauded and successfully-exited SE Asian startups. We were also well-known for building entire new companies and business capabilities for our large enterprise clients.
Further back, I’ve notably headed global technology at Amnesty International, the world’s largest human rights organization, and been Directeur Technique of France’s 5th largest private investment bank.
Off work, I’m an avid traveller and involved with conservation and wildlife causes. I study astronomy, physics, and genomics for personal interest (and have future PhD aspirations). I code open source and personal projects in Go, Ruby, Python, and Typescript. I’m also a scribbler of good tales, well told and an over-enthusiastic snowboarder, snorkeller, and trekker.
For secure communications, please use my main gpg public key, id 3F20 A015 3E1D 7043. Import directly into gpg with curl https://keybase.io/wakatara/pgp_keys.asc?id=3F20A0153E1D7043 | gpg --import.