Susan Kimberlin
Executive Producer at Good & Useful
Susan Kimberlin
Executive Producer at Good & Useful
San Francisco, California
Overview
Work Experience
Investor & Advisor
2014 - Current
I invest in things that I want to exist in the world. Things that are Good & Useful. I am an angel investor in founders who bring unique perspective and expertise to problems that fly under the radar and businesses, focusing on AI, ML, & NLP technology, big data applications, enterprise software/automation; B2B/B2B2C tech business models; complex consumer businesses: hospitality, women’s health, family tech. Angel Investing: Angels.VC, The Council, Gaingels Portfolio highlights: Fireflies.ai, Hostfully, You.com, Pavilion, Shuggies I am a limited partner in funds led by emerging managers with divergent & specific investment theses, inclusive fund structures, and diverse LP’s, with a bias toward impact outcomes. Portfolio highlights: Backstage Capital, Operator Collective, Boom Capital, Cleo Capital, Forum Ventures
Executive Producer
2018
As an Executive Producer, I support creative projects that raise awareness/shine a light on issues of social and economic equity, promote recognition of how we are more the same than we are different, start conversations, and bring joy. I work most often on fundraising, networking for distribution opportunities, and impact campaigns. “Clarissa’s Battle” is a documentary film that follows Social Justice Warrior Clarissa Doutherd as she leads a tenacious battle to build a coalition fighting for child care and early education funding. Her coalition grows into a diverse movement that becomes larger and more determined with each setback. “How To Make Her Leave” is a narrative film using comedy to explore insecurity and mental health. Weeks away from his wedding, an insecure guy puts his fiancée through a series of tests to see if she would cheat before they tie the knot. “The Last Team” is a documentary television series that will follow the last country on earth without a soccer team as their newly-formed federation hold grand plans to put a team together and compete in the World Cup Qualifiers and Olympics in 2028. “We Are Not Princesses” is a documentary film about the incredible strength and spirit of four Syrian women living as refugees in Beirut as they come together to tell their stories of love, loss, pain and hope through the ancient Greek play, Antigone.
Owner, Business Manager
2016
As the business manager, I manage contractors and vendors for farming operations, strategy and planning for vineyard infrastructure business, and marketing/sales of our fruit to wineries and wine makers. We grow Syrah, Grenache, Grenache Blanc, and Pinot Noir in the unique and beautiful Bennett Valley AVA, in the shadow of Sonoma Mountain. Despite our inland location, we get the tempering wind and fog that comes from the coast via the Petaluma Gap, allowing us to produce Pinot Noir that is similar to Sonoma Coast or Carneros in character, and unique expressions of Rhône varietals.
Singer, Finance & Business Operations
2005
The Loose Interpretations have been singing together and performing pop acappella covers in San Francisco and the greater Bay Area for nearly 20 years.
Product Management Leader
2007 - 2014
As a product management leader at Salesforce, I developed strategy and guided the implementation of Search features and infrastructure across Salesforce product lines, including Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, Data, platform, and APIs. Prioritization and communication were integral to my daily responsibilities, which included synthesizing roadmaps based on company and product line priorities, customer needs, and internal resources. I led cross-functional teams, emphasizing customer empathy and collaboration to gather product requirements and manage dependencies. Some notable projects I worked on include: - External Objects Project: Federated search and database queries across data stored outside the platform, integrating them with Salesforce data for a comprehensive view. - Mobile Era Transition: Utilized personalization techniques to drive search relevance for navigating Salesforce data on mobile devices with limited screen real estate. - Natural Language Understanding: Leveraged this technology to improve search relevance in response to the need for a better search experience with unstructured data in the Service product line. - Scaling Challenges: Addressed the challenge of scaling search as enterprise customer data grew explosively and user access complexity changed exponentially. - Technology Migration: Managed the migration of core tech from Lucene to Solr to handle the scale with faceting and other optimizations. During my tenure, I played a key role in the 10x growth of the Search organization, supporting recruiting for product managers and across team roles, particularly with engineering, recruiting for remote team development in the EU. I especially enjoyed M&A work, evaluating acquisition targets, onboarding colleagues from acquisitions, and integrating teams and products. Engaging with customers at events and user discussions was another highlight of my role, providing valuable input for product plans and strategy.
Board of Directors, Advisor
2011 - 2013
About-Face equips teen girls* with knowledge and tools to question media messages and support their mental health. Then, they take action in their own ways to push back against messages that don’t serve them.
Search Analyst
2004 - 2006
I worked in PayPal’s customer support and documentation group to manage search systems for PayPal customer support, optimizing for self-service, case deflection and efficient case resolution. I maintained PayPal’s Inquira customer support self-service search for PayPal site. I developed a Google OneBox search tool for internal use in the PayPal and eBay employee community. I collaborated with customer support content developers to optimize support articles for fast, easy access by support reps in the PayPal call center. We also did vendor evaluations for search and knowledge management solutions for PayPal site and PayPal Customer Support organization.
Computational Linguist
2002 - 2004
Discern was a startup building customer support web applications that used proprietary NLP search technology designed and incubated by the AI group at SRI. My role was a mix of product management, data admin, customer implementation management, and support. I developed general and industry-specific lexicons, did database administration, designed/built/tested admin tools. I ran our customer implementations and training, wrote user-facing documentation, and did front-line customer communications and support.
Knowledge Engineer
1999 - 2001
Resumix was an early applicant tracking / recruiting software product used by the US government and other very large enterprise organizations for managing recruiting at scale. As a knowledge engineer, I developed linguistic parsing rules for the product’s Knowledge Base, an expert system for extracting attributes from job descriptions and resumes to enable intelligent search and match of candidates to open roles at high volume.
Investments
Latest Articles
Domino Effect
Talks about Venture Capital, Diversity And Inclusion and Backstage Capital