Alex Schultz

About

Hi, I'm Alex (he/him). I am really proud to be openly gay at work and my personal life and to have a successful career at a couple of big name internet companies. I'd like that to act as an example to other lgbt people out there that it's possible to get to the top of your field and be out. I am Chief Data Officer at Meta, serve on the boards of Lindblad expeditions and Wessex Archaeology and am an Executive Fellow at the London Business School.I have been working in analytics/internet marketing/growth now for 10yrs+ and I love growing stuff. I think I am best at taking a good product and helping it grow faster, I certainly find that most exciting. I also hope I am good at hiring a great team (based on our results) and we have had great upward management feedback in every anonymous feedback survey run on my team.In my teens and at university growing my websites via SEO and then analyzing the traffic was my hobby. I ended up doing affiliate marketing and paid search arbitrage too to help pay for things. I used to love how back then every military base had its own IP range and one week I saw NORAD was visiting paperairplanes.co.uk a lot and I could imagine everyone bored looking for inbound Russian ICBMs throwing paper airplanes at each other. I even built a cocktail recommendation engine based on browsing behavior I called something like "cocktails you may like". Making sure there wasn't a positive feedback loop ended up being simple but fun to think through. I don't believe there's a better job out there for a direct response marketer and analyst than mine and I feel insanely lucky I got to make my hobby and passion my job.I also have to say that being on the board of Lindblad is a real honor and the challenges of helping bring digital marketing & analytics skills to selling expeditions to remote parts of the world is really interesting and cool.