my follow up email post-first round interview reiterating some additional points about my background and fit

Hi Freyan,

It was such a pleasure speaking with you earlier. I'm very excited about the potential here, and am happy I was able to provide some additional color to my background and professional experiences. I'd like to take this moment to thank you for your time and candor, as well as expand further on the context for how I fit for the COO role at Otis.

In terms of professional qualifications, my tenure at Storefront demonstrates a track-record of establishing operational excellence across 5 offices on 3 continents with ownership of customer success & on-boarding, account management, supply acquisition, product & UX feature development, enterprise business, culture, recruitment, local content, change management, and an intimate balancing of P&L. My role began as a sort of senior/head-of business development position, as that was the immediate need in the office in late 2016. My desire to be on the inside of what I believed was a very important solution superseded any desire for job title or rank. Inside of 4 months, I was already touching every office and department and ultimately fought for the opportunity to fully own these responsibilities on a formal basis, rather than ad-hoc. Based on my measured deliverables, I transitioned into an executive level GM role for N.America where I would own the performance, feedback loops, and full operation on a deeper level. N.America is our most promising market, and the one that will contribute most significantly to our 2020 GMV target of 50 million USD. We were able to scale the company's profitability with a brief reduction in personnel and cost structure in 2019, but with a recently closed Series A, I'm now leading an effort to 3x the team by end of 2020, as well as launch new markets in the midwest and pacific northwest.

My efforts to drive accountability through transparent and quantifiable business metrics is seen through my redevelopment of company wide performance dashboards which more cleanly isolate north star metrics, targets, and qualitative scores, as well as provide definitive and daily calls to action for my team members. I was able to do this by learning the individual pain points of our people and our customers, and subsequently ensure measurable focus was put on the greatest opportunities for improvement. My credibility as a leader and collaborator is constantly tested with new personnel joining our Paris, London and Amsterdam offices. One way I gauge success here is by the frequency in which they approach me for answers and for creative solutions, albeit having the co-founder or other senior personnel within earshot of them. This, to me, represents my position within the organization as a credible and trustworthy source of knowledge. It seems like these individuals, who have never met me in-person, are constantly directed to "Ask Ed" for their answers by others in the organization. When questions or issues repeat themselves, I record step-by-step solutions with video and screen sharing, post them to the organization, log all documentation and store them in a repository of company learning resources.

My financial experience at BlackRock and BNP Paribas demonstrate an intrinsic understanding of financial models, risk methodologies, and due diligence processes within the financial alternative investment space -- an area that has many overlapping principles with the asset classes Otis is focusing on. However, beyond my extensive work in MS Excel and Access on a team that oversaw $50bn AUM, there were regulatory changes to the margin methodologies we implored resulting in a continuous redevelopment of several internal softwares we used to measure portfolio risk. My plate was often full with translating legal language into formulaic Excel models for stress testing, Monte Carlo and VaR simulations on prospective client portfolios, and the decoding and delivery of information between technical personnel (risk, product, developers) with our business personnel (account services, sales traders, business analysts). The work was analytically stimulating and professionally challenging at the time, but the end-product was so abstracted away from me that I ultimately decided to leave the industry and move towards work that was more personally energizing. And while I don't practice some of my former functions on a daily basis today, the learning curve of tapping back into that skillset and knowledge base as it pertains to investment topology and strategy today is not a steep one for me, and an effort I welcome with extreme excitement.

The COO role also requires intellectual horsepower, excitement for the mission, a deep sense of curiosity, a collaborative spirt, thirst for learning, gravitas and integrity. Constant learning and reading are key pillars of my daily life, and aligning myself personally and professionally with others that share a similar intellectual curiosity is also very important to me. My expand my technical knowledge with tools like Coursera, sharpen my management skills with books by great leaders, and maintain my connection to the world's progress and pitfalls through numerous daily subscriptions. My zeal for what Otis is doing has manifested in my constant surveillance of anything Otis-related and repeated conversations with friends and family about 'this new awesome company' I found. The mission of democratizing access to culturally significant artifacts directly aligns with my core value as an entrepreneur after I left banking -- create, preserve, and share value of the makers of our generation. Preservation of that value for the artist themself is hugely important to me and presumably Otis, and the potential for that allegiance to sway the very model in which we buy, sell, trade, and consume works of art, is precisely one of the threads that can aid in stitching together the wealth gap that exists within these markets. I want to be among the change makers in the consumption, dissemination and public exhibition of these alternative assets. Ownership, even in the fractional sense, is intensely empowering and can truly revolutionize how these objects are consumed. I experienced it first hand when I sat on the Guggenheim's Young Collectors Council. We raised money through events to purchase works of art on behalf of the museum. Raising funds and carefully selecting the works through intellectual discourse to be owned by the museum, and partially by our small group, was an exhilarating feeling. This can happen for anyone and everyone. Financial pundits highlight the risk and the limited upside, but their school of thought is one rooted in historical trends and analysis. Historical analysis en masse did not predict 2008, nor the bull market of today. We must use economic analysis, but we also must trust our intuitions and study the behavioral undertones of a generation that wants co-this and co-that, a generation that wants to even the playing field and who wants to experience life and all of its riches, its art, its beauty, more than any other in modern history. I want and need to drive this movement forward. Curiosity, tenacity, and passion have pushed me towards and into every new opportunity I've taken in my professional career. My curiosity with how the perverse economics of the art market functioned drove me to build a profitable business that put the value of underrepresented artists at the forefront. My tenacity to transform and completely streamline a failing retail operation into a highly successful and attractive business allowed me to achieve one of my life's key objectives of delivering a retirement fund to my parents. My passion for making physical space accessible to artists, brands, and entrepreneurs to grow their visions by way of an internet platform drove me to scale operations for a global company, achieve 2,500+ booking transactions, reduce overhead, increase revenues, improve CSAT, and evolve employee well-being. I believe throughout each of these endeavors, I've brought people together and served as the nucleus from which others could source energy and guidance from. Whether I was in boardrooms with global heads on the trading floor, in the living room of high-net worth collectors discussing 6-figure acquisitions, or on stage speaking at a retail tech conference in front of 500 people, I enjoy the weight that comes with leadership, and the ripple effects it has on those around me.

I believe all of the responsibilities of the Otis COO resonate with work that I've excelled at delivering or am highly capable of accomplishing. Today, I work directly with two very different co-founders on all aspects of the business, with our VP of Engineering on ideation, product specifications, and real-time feedback, with our Head of Growth on content, paid, and SEO strategy, with our COO who, unconventionally, focuses purely on our Salesforce infrastructure and development, with our new CFO who I've been on-boarding on internal process and tools for the past month, and with our in-house legal counsel who I liaise with on all items related to disputes, contracts, or changes to our Terms of Service. Beyond these daily interactions, I manage several account and customer success managers, a UX designer, content manager, and oversee implementation and training of new features and processes across the organization and stack. I am a key contributor to the strategic direction and planning of the operations and product roadmaps, and have developed an infrastructure in Asana for sprint work using Scrum methodology. We didn't dive too deep on our call into my involvement with our Product & Engineering team at Storefront, but its a group that I interact with heavily through feature feedback loops and via weekly roadmap discussions. I've developed all the internal on-boarding & training dashboards for new employees, and am currently redesigning the flow of our entire landlord on-boarding journey and education experience. I am the lead recruiter for the US office for new talent, and am a big proponent of constant feedback and coaching sessions for existing talent. I run local all-hands for my team to share public information when opacity rears its head, and am in constant pursuit of collective alignment towards high-performance.

My list of priorities and tasks can often feel extensive, but time blocking and deep work has allowed me to balance the demands of my teammates, executive personnel, customers, landlords, and ultimately of myself to achieve more and more in shorter and shorter periods of time. I consider moves in my career holistically and with intense detail, and truly believe there is so much I can offer Otis, operationally, culturally, ideologically, and professionally.

I would love the opportunity to connect further with Michael and the team so I can share my excitement for all that is to come for Otis, and the many ideas I have for building the product, asset pool, investor incentives, and community.

Thank you very much for reading Freyan!

Warmly,