I build excellent cultures and thus excellent companies from the ground up to solve problems. Starting from generating and refining the idea through building and leading a team to execute the vision, I foster a culture that enables good people to do great things.
Proven ability to hire, lead and manage a diverse team through the stages of a business' lifecycle: inception, growth, and operational maturity.
Developed and maintained operations for a staff that grew to 30 people and hundreds of advertising clients and content partners. Implemented all necessary business functions including sales, procurement, finance, fundraising etc.
Well-versed in the intricacies of not only bringing a product to market but ensuring mass adoption through non-traditional (read inexpensive) means.
Developed several products from ideation through implementation and optimization. Created product/market fit through careful consideration of the incentives and intents of all of the users of a complex marketplace.
A record of taking complex problems and developing a coherent methodology and strategy to provide a solution quickly and cost-effectively.
Raised capital for my ventures at every stage, seed to series A and beyond, from both angel investors as well as some of the best VCs and bankers in the business.
HelpKitchen uses technology to connect food insecure individuals with partner restaurants to provide high quality, on demand free hot meals at price point competative with traditional soup kitchens. Since founding, HelpKitchen has served over 2.3 million meals to over 44,000 people. In 2021, we fed almost 15% of the entire food insecure population of San Francisco, all with a staff of only two.
Founded in February of 2014 with Hannah Calhoon, Blue Ridge Labs @ Robin Hood is a Brooklyn-based social impact incubator. Our programs combine the lean startup methodology with user centered design to encourage and support entrepreneurs, designers, developers and experts to build products for communities that are often overlooked by technology.
Founded in July of 2009, Copromote is a social marketing exchange for businesses to trade attention. Built by a small team of developers it now reaches hundreds of millions of followers through hundreds of thousands of influencers. Among a number of things, I helped to develop and hone the business plan and was responsible for the entire engineering effort, marketing and branding, as well as basic business operations. From ideation to the implementation of the first prototype, I lead a team of engineers and designers to build out a marketplace for cross promotion that scaled up to over three hundred thousand influencers, content creators, small business and musicians reaching an audience of hundred of millions of fans and followers. The Copromote marketplace facilitated the exchange of promotional messages that reached an average of 25 million people a day across Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
Founded in January 2005 with my business partner, we grew Selectable Media from just the two of us to one of the largest video ad networks in the country, delivering over 300 million video streams monthly to an audience of 40 million monthly unique people in US. In the process we raised over 6 million dollars in venture funding, built out an extensive base of advertising clients and content partners, such as Universal Music and Proctor and Gamble. Most importantly, I created a working environment that enabled great people to excel.
From incubation, through several pivots, I built a business that delivered over 400 million video views per month to an aggregate audience of 40 million monthly unique US visitors. I led the design, development and operations of a number of business critical projects: custom video CDN, ad delivery and tracking platform which logged and analyzed over a billion events per day, a rich media widget platform, and client side reporting and analytics package.
Bill Cromie — [email protected] — Brooklyn, NY — 917.215.3576