Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer Feedonomics, Woodland Hills Age: 27 Feedonomics helps retailers’ products appear higher in online searches at marketplaces such as Google Shopping and Amazon.com Inc. Rozien, who has an electrical engineering degree from UCLA, co-founded the company with his brother in 2013. Biggest Challenge Starting a Business? The beginning! We aren’t a venture capital backed company, so every dime we put into the business came from our own pockets. We didn’t have a burn rate or any extra money lying around, so we had to make every cent count. Every decision we make is incredibly deliberate, and it has paid off. We’ve grown tremendously, with over 85 employees working from offices in Woodland Hills, Northern California, Texas, Canada, U.K., Australia and South Africa. Motivation to Start Company: I was working at an advertising agency and was managing product optimization for dozens of large retailers. Along the way I tried every single legacy product feed platform out there, and grew frustrated with their extremely limited speed, reliability and flexibility to optimize. We built something to solve our own problem first, and then realized other advertising agencies and online retailers have the exact same problems. Most Interesting Aspect of Job: Solving the scalability challenges of working with huge amounts of data. We are optimizing billions of products every day for over 25 percent of the largest online retailers. At the highest level, we are helping disparate systems communicate with each other, with Feedonomics sitting in-between, acting as translator. Making that happen excites me. Personality on the Job: I love solving challenging problems and understanding why things are the way they are. One of my most important traits is the desire and ability to dive into the root cause of an issue very quickly and efficiently. This is especially useful when analyzing thousands of lines of complex code to troubleshoot something that isn’t working. Most Memorable Experience: Back when we were a team of only six or seven people, I used to end our meetings by saying “Feed On,” a phrase that grew to represent our culture and values. The most memorable experience of my career so far has been when it caught on and other people started saying it too! Biggest Misconception About the Industry: That automation is a silver bullet. Even though we have built amazing technology that allows for tons of automation, the Feedonomics team provides full-service optimization and support to our clients. Automation needs to be a tool rather than a crutch, and cannot be a replacement for creative problem-solving. Future Goal: Expand in e-commerce and grow into other verticals. We are already doing some of this by working with one of the largest job boards in the world. Entrepreneurial Advice: Solve a problem that you have first before you solve anyone else’s problem. You definitely need to eat your own dogfood and iterate rapidly.
