Zane Salim
Founder of Atlas
Zane Salim
Founder of Atlas
San Francisco, California
Overview
Work Experience
Co-founder and CEO
2022 - Current
Atlas is a payroll-powered charge card and income optimization platform. We make it easy for consumers to build credit, access credit and save money. It's like Ramp, but for consumers. Our goal is to put money on autopilot to reduce financial stress. We're backed by top VCs and growing quickly.
CEO
2021 - 2021
Digital freight booking marketplace for booking domestic shipments in just a few minutes, while saving up to 30% over some of the better-known options. Spun out GoShip from a traditional freight brokerage, and set it up as an independent company. Key milestones: * Raised $4m from strategic investors. Established access to 45k FTL carriers, and 33 major LTL carriers with wholesale pricing through strategic partnerships. * Accelerated GMV to $5.5m annual run rate, and 3x-ed "net revenue" to almost $1m run rate. Launched a modern e-commerce quoting, pricing and booking experience. Added new services like same day pickup, grew nascent new FTL service 5x, and reduced credit card fraud to almost zero. * Improved marketing efficiency and scaled content, promotions, advertising and outbound emails. Proved inside sales and built out a playbook to efficiently scale the team. * Build engineering, marketing, sales, ops/support and finance teams from scratch. Hired and supported a team of 15 working on GoShip across all functions. Once GoShip was setup with a strong team and trajectory, I worked with the board to transition leadership, as the spinout ended up not being the right long-term structure and setup for me personally.
Product Lead
2019 - 2021
Helped build and scale a new org focussed on growing Messenger in the US. Worked at the intersection of the FB Growth Team and Messenger. Overall: accelerated year-over-year daily user growth in the US by almost 2x, increasing daily active users by several million in the US and tens of millions globally. Strategy: established the strategy to grow daily users by increasing conversations across Facebook and Messenger. Setup three new areas/teams- Conversation Starters, Ranking, and Response Rate. Execution: built multiple high impact products across FB and Msgr to help people: * easily share content with friends and see who is online to chat * spark conversations from content in Newsfeed, Groups, Stories, etc. * find friends more easily through better ranking and recommendations * not miss messages and respond faster through better push-ability and notifications * get cohesive notification experiences in FB, Msgr, Email and SMS across billions of users Was fortunate to work with some amazing people, and learn an incredible amount during my time at FB.
Co-founder and CEO
2016 - 2019
SaaS messaging, scheduling, work tracking, invoicing and reporting product for small businesses with front-line employees doing service based work. We built some of the best and easiest to use mobile productivity software at the time. Our vision was to become the system of record for these teams, and eventually bundle integrated financial services like invoice factoring and workmans comp insurance. We raised $1.8m in seed funding from Y-Combinator, Fuel Capital, Global Founders Capital and several prominent angel investors. At the peak we were up to 10 employees. In the end, it was a difficult market and we couldn't find explosive adoption. Learnt a lot from the journey.
Expert Network Advisor
2015 - 2018
Worked with few First Round startups on product and growth https://medium.com/@firstround/startup-advising-is-broken-here-s-what-we-re-doing-to-fix-it-5454c952540
Product Lead and Head of Growth
2015 - 2016
Joined the company as the third product manager. Led consumer product and growth across traffic, conversion, and repeat use. Drove over $1b in GMV growth. Founded the growth team. Grew revenue 2.7x through measurable product changes, delivering over $1b in additional GMV / earnings for professionals. Scaled team to 20+ engineers, designers and analysts running close to 50 experiments a quarter. Key launches: image based project creation, price prediction for consumers, category content and recommendations, responsys email system, and various tests that drove large increases in traffic, 50+% higher conversion, and 90% increase in same session repeat. Read more about Thumbtack in the Wall Street Journal and Forbes: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/05/22/thumbtack-raises-30m-from-sequoia-tiger-global-to-build-amazon-of-services/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2014/12/17/the-hottest-startups-of-2014/
Senior Technical PM
2012 - 2014
Drove product strategy, execution and growth in a technical program management role. Led several impactful product and program initiatives during rapid growth. Product development: shipped first few versions of Twitter Insights - tweet analytics for consumers, publishers and advertisers. Rebuilt the internal experimentation platform and process, to support 100s of experiments every quarter. Product strategy: drove user data / identity strategy across consumer and advertising products. Worked with exec swat team to execute pre-IPO growth strategy to improve engagement and retention.
PM
2009 - 2012
Led home media streaming from Windows to Xbox. Built APIs and Inbox App Experiences to stream content from Windows to any interoperable device with support for the DLNA protocol - open standards based version of AirPlay and Chromecast. Received two "gold star" awards and three rapid promotions. Shipped two major releases. Win7: the fastest selling Windows release ever. And Win8: where we reimagined the operating system for mobility, touch, full screen apps, and power efficient SoC processors. Working on the OS that introduced me to computing (and programming) was incredible.
Education
Bachelor’s Degree
2004 - 2008
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