american-express
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Hannah Kelly Is Turning the Reservation Into a Relationship
At Resy, Hannah Kelly is making a case that the smallest rectangle on your phone can lead to something much larger: discovery, loyalty, and a table people remember.
Resy’s First Idea Flopped. The Pivot Put 25,000 Venues on One Menu.
Resy began by asking diners to pay for scarce tables. Restaurants told the founders what they actually needed - better software - and that correction became a dining platform, an American Express loyalty engine, and a useful lesson in listening before scaling.
Clayton Ruebensaal’s One-Page Theory of the Modern Brand
After shaping brands at The Ritz-Carlton, American Express and Comcast, Clayton Ruebensaal has taken on a harder brief at TransUnion: make a global data company feel legible, useful and trusted.
The Card Network Ate Center. Emburse Ate Everyone Else.
Two expense-software empires took opposite roads to the same prize. Emburse spent years stitching together aging brands like Certify and Chrome River; Center simply handed the keys to American Express - and finance teams are the ones who have to live with the difference.
Jay Lee Wants Marketing and Revenue to Speak the Same Language
The Five9 growth chief trained as an engineer, learned marketing inside payments giants, and now runs a job that most companies keep in two separate offices.
Aparna Sarin Is Putting the Customer Inside the Revenue Equation
After building products for small-business owners, the former Capital One and American Express executive has taken on a broader experiment at Hiscox: joining customer insight, product, distribution and growth in one job.
Elizabeth Rutledge
Elizabeth Rutledge spent two years learning how to hold a classroom’s attention. At American Express, she turned the same instinct - know your audience, earn their trust, make the lesson useful - into more than 35 years of building a modern relationship brand.
Leslie Berland
From American Express's first tweets to Verizon's glowing V, Leslie Berland has built a career by making giant systems feel human - and by treating attention as something a brand must earn.
American Express
American Express began by moving parcels, gold and cash. Today, its most valuable cargo may be the information flowing between cardholders, merchants and a network it controls end to end.
Matthew Bellows
Matthew Bellows is a serial founder turned investor who is now Acting CEO of Averi, an AI-plus-human marketing platform in New York. He built and sold three companies - the mobile-games media bet WGR Media (to CNET), the sales-software pioneer Yesware (to Vendasta), and the digital financial-planning startup BodesWell (to American Express) - and now invests as a General Partner at Grit Capital. A longtime meditation teacher who studied Buddhist and Western psychology at Naropa, he is known for pairing hard-nosed sales discipline with a calm, mindfulness-first leadership style.
Lawrence Herman
Lawrence Herman is the Chief Financial Officer and AI Strategy Leader at Cents, the all-in-one operating system for laundromats and dry cleaners. A payments and fintech finance veteran, he has steered the books at Dwolla, Accrete, and Paxful, and logged earlier stretches at Mastercard, American Express, Dataminr, EY, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. Harvard-trained in economics, he is known for calm during industry cycles, a preacher's zeal for financial literacy, and a habit of walking into every meeting with three discussion points and three asks.
Allison Romano
Allison Romano is Vice President of Xbox Digital Marketing and Media at Microsoft, based in New York. With over 15 years leading high-impact marketing and product teams across Microsoft, Google, American Express, and CLEAR, she has shaped how some of the world's biggest brands reach digital audiences. At Xbox, she oversees digital marketing and media strategy for one of the most recognized gaming brands on the planet, blending B2B and B2C expertise to drive growth at scale.
Swapnil Shinde
Swapnil Shinde is the CEO and Co-founder of Zeni, an AI-powered finance operations platform for startups headquartered in Palo Alto. A serial entrepreneur with three company launches and two successful exits - Dhingana (acquired by Rdio) and Mezi (acquired by American Express for ~$150M) - he co-founds every venture with his identical twin brother Snehal. At Zeni, Swapnil leads marketing, sales, and operations while Snehal owns product and tech. The company manages over $1 billion in startup finances monthly, has raised $49.5M in funding, and serves hundreds of venture-backed startups with real-time AI-driven bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO services.
Victoria Treyger
Victoria Treyger is a Senior Venture Partner at Felicis Ventures who spent 17+ years as a hands-on operator before crossing over to VC. She scaled Kabbage from a startup to nearly $300M in revenue across six straight years of 100%+ growth before its $850M acquisition by American Express in 2020. At Felicis, she backs fintech, SMB software, and health tech founders with the tactical depth of someone who has actually done the job.