Ian Kar

GTM

2024 - Current

Marketing, sales, & partnerships Greenlite is an AI compliance team for every financial institutions. Our AI agents augment your staff, helping them support more customers, transactions and growth.

Consultant

2018 - 2024

I consult on and off—based on how much spare time I have and how excited I am about the opportunity. I mainly focus on Product and Marketing consulting for seed, Series A-C companies. Some past work includes: -media company looking to revamp product experience -seed startup looking to revamp copy and marketing materical -Series A startup on marketing and events -early stage crypto company on product strategy and vision -Series D crypto infrastructure company on product strategy & GTM

Founder

2019 - 2023

-A 3x/week newsletter with 25000+ total subscribers (all organic); open rate constantly above 60% (industry benchmark is 22%) -Built out revenue to $XXX,XXX/per month in revenue & $XX,XXX/MRR -Built private Slack community of 500 members from the biggest fintech startups, venture firms, and banks (Goldman Sachs, Snapchat, A16Z, First Round, Chime, Venmo, and more) -led cobranded offline events with sponsors with firms like Activant Capital, Truework, and Finix -built a recruiting arm that connected new and experienced operators with companies hiring in fintech & crypto -led hiring and recruiting for the company, building out a team of 4 full time employees & 3 interns -led monetization by pursuing a joint advertising & subscription model, pioneering one of the earliest advertising strategies for industry newsletters, widely used today. -led brand efforts, including merchandise creation & logisitics, and social media campaigns

Head of Product

2018 - 2019

As the head of product at Tasting Room (one of the largest wine clubs in the US), I had a variety of responsibilities: -product lead for our B2C product and our B2B offerings -worked closely with partners like HelloFresh, The New York Times, Williams Sonoma, and Time Inc on white-label strategy -work closely with the CMO and CTO to develop a product roadmap, assign projects to the engineering team, and ensure projects are completed on time -started a User Research and Experiments committee in the company to make sure we were communicating important user research back to other departments and developing experiments in a thoughtful and collaborative way while also iterating quickly -started a Project Planning committee to work with other departments to prioritize projects at a high level -develop wireframes and prototypes for new features, working on the high level design and UX, including our site redesign and new ecommerce features -work closely with our warehouse partners, customers service, and our logistics team to iron out potential shipping issues, integrate into a new warehouse management system, and develop features for our users to improve the shipping experience

Product Manager

2017 - 2018

Product Manager

2016 - 2017

Acorns (Acorns.com) is the world's leading micro investing app, allowing anyone to grow wealth by automatically investing small amounts like spare change. I was the main product manager on financial literacy, conceptualizing & building the in-app experience. I also was a new product development PM and assisted in conceptualizing the IRA & debit card products.

Finance reporter

2015 - 2016

I cover the future of finance, or fintech, and was one of the first reporters covering the sector at any major mainstream publication. My work was widely cited by other publications like Vogue & Re/Code.

Reporter

2014 - 2014

As a reporter for Bank Innovation, I covered the emerging market of financial technology. I've interviewed and profiled fintech startups like Betterment, Moven, and Earnest and bitcoin related startups as well. I've broken a number of key stories in the financial technology industry -- from things like a "bitcoin demo day" in Washington D.C. to the the inner workings of PayPal and executive changes for Visa and Capital One. In addition, I've interviewed a number of experts and industry leaders as well as members of the Federal Reserve and New York Department of Financial Services.

Technology Editor

2013 - 2013

At Heavy.com, I covered tech as a reporter-editor. I edited a majority of the articles in the section and my articles have attributed to the majority of the page views in the vertical. A number of my articles have also been cited by a number of reputable news outlets including The Hollywood Reporter, The Verge, and BGR. I also assisted in breaking news stories.

Technology Reporter

2012 - 2013

Researched and reported technology news for IBTimes.com with a focus on fintech, start-ups, social media companies, and cyber-security.