# West Stringfellow

> Operating executive and founder. 2x Founder & CEO (one company acquired by Target), 2x Chief Product & Technology Officer. Twenty years applying AI in production at Amazon, Visa, PayPal, and Target, starting in 2005. Five technology patents. Currently Founder & CEO of HowDo.

## Career highlights

- Amazon (2004-2007): Built the video asset and metadata operations platform behind Amazon Unbox, Amazon's first digital video service and the precursor to Prime Video. Proposed and launched Amazon's first paid web service, the Historical Pricing API, five months before AWS launched S3. Established Amazon's first international fraud office in Bangalore; merchant-risk team's machine-learning models cut marketplace fraud losses 98%.
- Visa (2007-2009): 22-person team built Visa's first direct-to-consumer payment product, Visa's first head-to-head answer to PayPal; the work earned two technology patents. Rebuilt Verified by Visa around machine-learning risk scoring, growing usage 130% year over year.
- PayPal (2010-2012): Led a 1,000-person product, engineering, and design organization across nine global locations. Built the first omnichannel wallet and point-of-sale payments platform, expanding PayPal's addressable market 12x. Managed platform serving 110M+ users and $120B+ in annual payments.
- Rosetta Stone (2012-2013, Chief Product & Technology Officer): Scaled active customers 1,000% and cut COGS 80% by pivoting from boxed software to digital SaaS. Launched the company's first kids products (iKids Best Learning App award, #2 on iTunes) and first B2B SaaS product.
- Every / Target (2014-2017): Founded Every, raised $16M+, acquired by Target. Served as Target's first Entrepreneur in Residence and VP of Innovation; created what became Target Accelerators.
- HowDo (2017-present, Founder & CEO): Building an AI-powered business platform. Built an AI mentor generating tailored business insights from 50,000 hand-curated data points, five years before ChatGPT; created the world's largest open-source innovation course, reaching 400,000+ learners.

## Links

- [Homepage](https://weststringfellow.com/)
- [HowDo](https://howdo.com/): current company
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/weststringfellow)
- [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@west-stringfellow)
- [Substack](https://substack.com/@weststringfellow)

## Contact

- Email: west@howdo.com