Andrew Skinner

andrew@andrewskinner.me | LinkedIn: arskinner

CTO / Head of Product

Product and technology leader with 20+ years of experience building successful, scalable, products and teams for early stage startups up to Fortune 100 companies. Proven track record of innovative technology thinking, strategic product planning, and building profitable businesses in a wide range of industries.

Areas of Expertise

  • Product Management
  • Technology Strategy
  • Remote Teams
  • Systems Design
  • DevOps & CI/CD
  • Infrastructure & Scaling
  • Serverless Architecture
  • Mobile Development
  • VOD & Streaming
Professional Experience
  • PurposeLab Los Angeles, CA
    Co-founder & CTO
    2010 - Present

    PurposeLab is a venture product studio, helping to build and fund consumer and enterprise products. We’ve worked with everyone from early stage startups to corporations and celebrities like The Economist, American Express, Best Buy, the Kardashian-Jenners, Tyler the Creator, and more.

    Select Projects
    Swan Bitcoin

    As the founding tech partner of Swan Bitcoin, we built the Bitcoin exchange and educational platform from the ground up, including complex integrations with third-party financial systems. As the #1 Bitcoin Wealth Platform in the US, Swan has processed over $6 billion in Bitcoin transactions and growing.

    Technology: NodeJS, React, AWS
    The Grommet

    The Grommet allows consumers to vote for their favorite consumer product innovations from independent makers, and receive discounts on the products they support. We built the platform from scratch, and helped scale it to millions of users and millions of dollars in sales in its first year.

    Technology: PHP/Laravel, VueJS, AWS
    GiddyUp

    Built a custom CMS for creating complex conversion funnels for GiddyUp, a leading DTC performance marketing agency. The new platform lead to a 100% increase in conversion rate and now processes millions of dollars in sales per month.

    Technology: PHP/CraftCMS, VueJS, AWS
    The Kardashian-Jenners

    In collaboration with Whalerock Industries, we built a content and commerce mobile application framework for the Kardashian-Jenner sisters. Each sister had their own app, featuring lifestyle blogs, video tutorials, and on-demand live streams. At launch, 3/5 of the apps were in the top 50 in the App Store and 10s of millions of viewers tuned in to their live stream on Day 1.

    Technology: Swift, Kotlin, Django, Wowza, AWS
    Tyler, the Creator

    Rapper, designer and entrepreneur Tyler, the Creator, is known for his unique style and music. In collaboration with his team, we built a mobile application that was “basically [his] brain in one place.” The app featured his music, tour dates, original streaming content, an e-commerce store, and more.

    Technology: Swift, Kotlin, Django, AWS
    The Economist

    In collaboration with The Economist, we built a content marketing advertising platform called Trigr. The premium ad units became The Economist’s most profitable ad product, generating hundreds of millions of impressions for many Fortune 500 brands. Due to The Economist’s global appeal, ad units were automatically deployed to worldwide edge locations for <100ms load times.

    Technology: NodeJS, AWS
  • HipSwap Santa Monica, CA
    Co-founder & CTO
    2011 - 2014

    Co-founded and raised venture capital for HipSwap, an early peer-to-peer mobile marketplace startup. Investors included Founders Fund, Allen & Company, Greycroft, Michael Ovitz, and others. Launched publicly at Jason Calacanis’ LAUNCH Festival.

  • PopRule Santa Monica, CA
    Lead Engineer
    2008 - 2010

    PopRule was a political social news startup, similar to Digg for politics.

Education
  • 2008
    Brown University
    B.A. Commerce, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship
    Magna Cum Laude