My Career
I've led large product and operations teams to success at all company stages:
Startup, growth, pre-IPO, and tech giant. As a 2x founder, my product philosophy stems from accepting you can't know all the answers, so you better get damn good at learning them as fast as possible.
Their words, not mine
"Simply put, Peter is a phenom."
"Peter is one of the best product people I've ever worked with."
"Without any hesitation, I would hire, partner with, or back Peter Simones."
Skills
Top Skills
Better Than Most
As a 2x founder, I've done everything required to build and run apps and websites except backend engineering. Yes, everything. No, I don't want to write another Terms of Service.
Job History
The SZN
Founded as a side project and taken full-time after widespread U.S. sports betting legalization, I've grown The SZN ("season") into the world's largest network for sports pools. 90% of sports fans prefer a solution other than sports betting, and The SZN delivers entertainment and social value far beyond a transactional bet.
While full-time (2022–24), I 3x'd revenue, greatly expanded the product offering, and bootstrapped to profitability at an industry-leading gross margin. With the business healthy and growing, I transitioned the CEO role to my co-founder in May 2024.
Hats I wore: Everything except backend engineering.
Facebook / Meta
Was the Company's #1-overall-rated PM manager over 3.5 years, leading product groups of 100–300 people (with 6–8 direct PM reports). I became the go-to leader for strategy-critical and time-sensitive efforts, like bringing Rooms from zero code/design to global launch in two months.
- 2021: Overall Lead, Integrity Verticals & Incubation. Led the 100-person group responsible for integrity strategy and outcomes in critical global issue areas. Managed 6 PMs.
- 2019–2020: PM Manager / Overall Lead, Cross-App Experiences. Led the 100-person group responsible for incubating products that spanned multiple apps. Directly managed 6 PMs. Served as overall Company lead for Rooms launch on FB App, going from zero code/design to global launch in two months (Apr–May 2020).
- 2018: PM, Feed & Stories. Key projects, including how to shift News Feed's core product DNA to better facilitate "time well spent" and meaningful social interactions.
NFX
NFX is a network- and marketplace-focused seed stage VC firm. 18 months after going through NFX's accelerator as a founder, James asked me to be NFX's first head of product, taking both the software and the team from 0 to 1.
NFX's first product, Signal, helps founders find the right investors and helps investors attract the right deals. The graph is built on top of Gmail metadata, enabling us to create millions of second-degree "intro path strength" scores between well-matched founders and investors.
Hats I wore: Everything except backend engineering.
YouFood
Better eating requires habit change; there are no shortcuts. I founded YouFood to deliver that habit change in a simple, sustainable way.
Over 500,000 registered members made YouFood the world's highest rated health & fitness app (4.9/5 on iOS), and formed a deeply engaged community (8.5 app opens/day) that has driven profound change for thousands of people.
Hats I wore: Product & design (the full app), growth, community management, fundraising, SQL & data analysis, personalization algorithm writing, email coding.
Chegg
After Chegg acquired Cramster, I was asked to lead the integration and run the subsequently named "Chegg Study" product.
Chegg's textbook rental business was a user acquisition machine but a financial fast track to bankruptcy. We completed the massive integration project ahead of schedule while simultaneously propelling the Study business to 100%+ YoY growth.
Chegg Study made the IPO possible, and is now a $150M annual business that accounts for nearly all of Chegg's revenue. What we architected remains the bedrock of Chegg's product and operations.
Cramster
I joined Cramster as employee #2 — pre-fundraising — while still in college. First leading product, then running operations, I helped build Cramster into the world's top college study site.
As Head of Operations, I oversaw a team of 300 people across three offices and two countries, inclusive of content operations, back-office technology, business intelligence, and customer service.
Cramster's promise was in answering any question — instantly, or within 2 hours of it being asked. I architected both the operations management system enabling that promise, and the people and processes delivering it.
Both the OM technology and people behind it remain the focal point of Chegg Study's $150M business.
NFX Guild
YouFood was part of NFX's inaugural 2015 cohort. James, Stan, and Gigi made me see that most startups are busy trying to follow the rules without realizing they're playing the wrong game.
If you're trying to build a society-impacting consumer product — a billion dollar business — you need to understand the game. "If you're asking yourself whether it's working, it isn't."
Easily the best educational experience of my life.
Other stuff that might be important if you want to hire me
- Sports Editor of USC's Daily Trojan during the football team's peak run under Pete Carroll; wrote 100+ articles and columns and edited 1,000 more
- USC Trustee Scholar (full tuition, merit-based); 3.89 college GPA
- I built a CD burning business when I was 12. After my revenue rose to $200/day, my mom promptly shut it down
- 35 ACT; 800 SAT Math, 800 SAT II Math, 800 SAT Writing
- Once had a five-minute conversation with Aaron Rodgers
Work Examples
Facebook Product
Projects for which I was the overall Company lead (i.e. responsible for strategy and execution, responsible for resourcing and team health, and most accountable for ultimate outcome):
- Rooms — Zoom competitor; "chosen one" bridge product to AR/VR enhanced future; 6 weeks of daily, direct interfacing with Mark; 300+ people on the project
- Stories Reader — Full consumer-side content liquidity between FB and IG; massively political and contentious execution environment; precursor to today's Reels integration; 50 people on the project
- Facebook App messaging platform and inbox — 5+ years after forcing Messenger installs, we launched full messaging functionality in the FB App, inclusive of an inbox in many non-US countries; 100 people on the project
- COVID-19 Integrity — About as "in the fire" as any effort at any company this century; led the myriad teams handling all things COVID-19 vaccine integrity, from policy definition to ML detection to human-powered escalation tooling to first-of-its-kind public-facing data transparency; 100s of people on the project; ask President Biden how we did
YouFood Product & Design
You name it, I designed it — from point of entry (App Store pages) to new user onboarding (walkthrough, coachmarks, following recommendations) to power user features and rapid A/B testing.
Both peers and investors told us YouFood's active user engagement was the best they'd ever seen (non-Facebook category). This engagement led to tens of thousands of YouFood members transforming their health and happiness.
Key Product Design Decisions
Dual home feeds
YouFood revolved around peer support and accountability; a chronological feed ensured you could follow your peers' days. When members continually asked for inspirational recipes and achievements from the broader community, we had to deliver this without disrupting that support anchor. The solution was a "Daily Awesomeness" toggle that surfaced 5–15 of the previous day's best posts, personalized to your diet and goals. By keeping it finite and releasing it at a specific time each day, we boosted overall engagement (6.5 → 8.5 app opens/day; 20m → 24m time spent/day) without sacrificing any peer support.
Retention "magic ratio"
Through continual testing and analysis, we identified a set of behaviors within a new member's first seven days that predicted, effectively, lifetime retention. We then reengineered our in-app language, new member onboarding, suggested following algorithm, welcome series emails, first week push notification strategy, and Daily Awesomeness post selection algorithm to maximize new members' achieving of this magic ratio. As volume of members meeting this ratio more than doubled, the retention effect held — validating our hypothesis.
Cramster/Chegg Operations: Forecasting & Staffing
Cramster's Q&A promise — we'll answer any college-level question you have, in any subject and at any time of the day or night, within two hours — was vexing, especially as question volumes hit an inflection point in 2009.
I architected and implemented the solution, from start to finish, resulting in profitability at 85% service level.
Problem Components
- Forecasting overall question volume amid 100%+ YoY growth
- Forecasting seasonality, which varied heavily by month, day of week, and hour of day
- Forecasting average question difficulty (and thus, time to answer)
- Modeling in-house answering capacity
- Predicting managed network answering need
- Implementing 24/7 staffing schedules to properly match forecasted demand
- Building the operations management software to deliver employees the right question to answer, right now
- Performance measurement
- Service level analysis (Per subject, are we answering 85% of questions within two hours? If not, why?)
- P&L analysis (Are some subjects more profitable than others? What drives profitability?)
Work Required to Solve the Problem
- Heavy Excel modeling and sanity testing against early indicator data
- Building a 24/7 staffing plan within budget
- Designing an operations management backend from scratch, and managing the engineering team building it
- Training 20 managers and their 300+ reports on a new operational model, from the technology they use to the way performance is evaluated
- Evaluating efficacy and tweaking the system (from task distribution algorithms to staffing schedules) to patch weak areas
- Evaluating P&L
Results
- Successfully answered 85% of all questions asked within 2 hours of being posted
- Raised engineering subjects' service levels from 45% to 85%
- The OM backend I architected and implemented became the bedrock of all company operations, and has successfully scaled as Chegg Study has grown into a $150M annual business