Sean Everett spent 20+ years in product management, starting with actuarial work at PwC and Willis Towers Watson, then 15 years building products at companies like HomeAdvisor and Gemba. He co-founded Adam & Luna, an early story-format app that predated Instagram and Snapchat, and now runs Everett Advisors, a consultancy focused on 0-to-1 product launches and rapid growth.
Hey everybody, uh, I am recording an about video because, well, 2 reasons. First one is because I'm a product person. If I don't try to productize myself, then maybe I'm not a very good product person. So, um, I often find that, you know, a lot of us have little introduction calls, and wouldn't it be nice if there was just a little video recording that we could send to people that gave them a little bit of background on ourselves. In that way, it would save us time on introductions. It's sort of decentralized, on demand, and maybe it saves us, you know, 5, 10, 20 minutes, especially in larger groups. So with that said, here's, here's my about video. So yeah, my name's Sean Everett. Hi, Sean Everett. I have a little over 20 years of experience. Educational background, undergrad was math, actuarial science, passed a couple exams. MBA, business school from University of Chicago Booth. They're pretty well known for finance and economics, a lot of Nobel Prizes there. Professionally, I started my career doing incentives design and actuarial science for Like big accounting firms, big human capital firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers and what's now known as Willis Towers Watson, used to be Watson Wyatt. They've been around for, I think, over 100 years. Almost merged with Aon. The M&A transaction didn't go through, but employee benefits, I think incentives is the key thing there. Spent about 5 years doing that and then about 15 years doing high technology. And specifically product management. I've been a former founder. Probably the most notable thing is the stories media format that you see across all of the social networks now— Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, etc. We— I don't know if we invented it, but we were definitely one of the first before Snapchat. We had a company called Adam and Luna, and they created Story App, which let you record your voice over multiple photos, and that created a video, and that was then shared in a social feed. And then we had a little animated character who was— it was basically AI that would run your voice and pictures through, detect your emotion, and then respond with facial expressions. So It was very early stories, you know, you tap through different photos or videos. I was very early on the animated emoticons that like Apple uses now. In addition to that, I spent a number of years working for multinational companies. I was very early on video streaming for consumers, enterprise, and broadcast companies. I've done augmented reality and industrial hardware, spatial computing software in the Web3 space, social networks, collective intelligence. I always leave something out, but suffice to say, oh yeah, Angie Home Improvement Services, HomeAdvisor. I've done investment trading apps, company Forbes called QAI. Gemba was a company which tried to platform and productize the whole product development process for a million different types of products, physical objects that you see around us that consumers buy every day. So yeah, I pretty much run the gamut from all stages of company size, from like not even an idea to pre-seed, seed, A, B, public company, private equity-backed turnarounds. I've worked in VC-backed companies for VCs, the board. I've been in the boardrooms of some of the biggest companies in the world, like Walmart, RadioShack, Blockbuster, Enterprise. some banking companies. This is back early 2000s as well. So a lot of experience. I think my particular area of expertise is software product management, very specifically in the 0 to 1 product and growing the North Star metric 50% monthly. That's about 10% week over week. It's a very impactful place. You see a lot of VCs these days moving downstream from like late-stage growth to Series A and C because that's where, you know, small investments can have huge impact and growth levers. So yeah, my entire career has essentially been working in and operating startups. So it's just a combination of strategy, operational excellence, and product requirements. Basically, like figuring out what matters is the only thing that matters. So we can then figure out how to go build it efficiently and then see how that is impacted in the numbers. And the last thing I'll leave you with is testing in production. Software is a unique world where you can deploy something almost instantaneously to the open internet with 5 billion users, and in real time you can get feedback on the things that you're creating. Which is like nothing else that's ever come before it in the history of humankind, that tight feedback loop down to like millisecond, honestly. And so, you know, if you talk to a lot of user researchers, the experts in the area, designers, even other product managers, what they'll tell you is that what people say, like this customer development product where you get out of the office, you go talk to customers, what they say isn't often what they do. Right, so you see a lot of information on social media, but it doesn't necessarily relate to the behaviors and the actions and the purchasing behaviors and the interactions that people actually have on a day-to-day basis. So it's this constant battle between, you know, our frontal lobe and sort of the animal instinct that we try but Hard to escape. So yeah, that's a little bit about me. Again, my name is Sean Everett. You can find me on Twitter, Sean M Everett, or LinkedIn, Sean M Everett. Pretty much Sean M Everett everywhere. And then company, I own a small boutique called Everett Advisors with my wife, who's a world-class expert in brand. She's worked with probably the biggest sports and entertainment companies in the world, and she would blush hearing me say this, but The influencer behind the influencer behind the influencer, the creative that changes the brands that you wear on your t-shirts and your hats and the things that you buy and the things you have an emotional connection with. She is one of those people. So if you really want to pull back the curtain all the way and go direct to the source, take a look at everettadvisors.com. Anyways, that's it for me. It's a Wednesday here in sunny Tennessee, beautiful spring day, and I've got a couple dogs sitting at my feet right now. So maybe about time to take them out for a walk. All right, it's a pleasure to meet you, and hopefully we can have a long-standing relationship and go build something better to help change the world for the, for the positive. All right, we'll talk to you soon. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye.
