ma·​ven

\ ˈmā-vən \: one who is experienced or knowledgeable

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We assembled Mavan from our own experiences and built the team we wish we'd had when we worked in house.

When partnering with us, you’re adding a team of specialists who’ve supported each other for years while scaling some of today’s biggest tech companies. You’re accessing the consultants we wish we could’ve relied upon when we worked in-house. Our experiences inform our belief that sustainable growth requires an organization-wide effort. We’ve brought together the most talented people from a wide range of industries who can optimize every function of your businesses growth across branding, sales, marketing, engineering, strategy, and monetization.

Our exclusive network is primarily invitation only because like attracts like: there is no B-team. Our founders are former growth leaders at Apple, Google, Masterclass, Meta, Netflix, Snapchat and more. Together we’re building the most talented network of growth professionals and rewarding them for applying a scientific approach to developing and scaling transformative businesses. Whether that’s your business or our own—our focus is always to create measurable and sustainable growth

Leadership team

Matt Widdoes

Matt Widdoes

CEO

Widdoes has built and led teams at various start-ups across the valley as well as iconic brands including RedBull, Intuit, Zynga, and King. He has deep experience across Operations, Marketing and Business Development. He’s worked cross-functionally to drive growth at massive enterprises and has been responsible for roughly $1B in media spend and billions of dollars in revenue. He is also an active angel investor and start-up advisor with a rich network of top talent across Silicon Valley and beyond.

LinkedIn

Expert from

King
Red Bull
Zynga
Malachi Rose

Malachi Rose

VP of Growth

Malachi is a mobile growth veteran having spent the last 10 years growing some of the preeminent mobile gaming and fintech companies in the world. He has deep knowledge in performance marketing and has worked across almost every digital channel. At Zynga, he lead growth across all products, was responsible for nine-figure annual advertising budgets, built the growth marketing team, and helped the company achieve a profitable turnaround during his 3.5 years there. At Digit, he built a growth organization and scaled ARR by 3x in the first year.

LinkedIn

Expert from

Digit Co
Rumble
Zynga
Stephen Metzger

Stephen Metzger

VP of Operations

Stephen has grown and operated international teams for multiple start-ups across marketing, SaaS, and Web3 industries. His expertise is in Business Operations, Process Management, Finance, and RevOps. Prior to Mavan, he served as operations lead at a marketing agency in Los Angeles, while also acting as an advisor for many theatrical partners including: A24, Sundance, and Lionsgate.

LinkedIn

Expert from

Operam
Panoramic
Syspro
Jay Severson

Jay Severson

VP of Product Dev

Jay is a gamer through and through, and loves to mix his passion for gaming with his love of tech, product, and software development. Jay was doing esports before esports was invented, having won the 1998 worldwide Starcraft Championship, received a sponsorship with Logitech, and played in South Korea. He started his first company, World Gaming Federation, while still in college. In 2006, Jay put his time and energy into his other passion, chess, when he cofounded Chess.com and was the CTO there for over a decade. Chess.com is now a top 200 Alexa site with 5M MAUs and millions of games played daily! Jay is currently working on a Catan based passion project, Landover, to make Catan fun and accessible for mobile!

LinkedIn

Expert from

Chess
MGIC
Visual Concepts
Alex Arevalo

Alex Arevalo

VP of Experimentation

Alex leads the CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) team for Mavan at Gold Tree and was previously a product manager at Snapchat. Over the last two years, he's helped clients including Lionsgate, Zig Zag, and United Health Care improve conversion rates via mid-funnel site optimizations and has driven over $50M in incremental revenue. His team runs end to end CRO from setup to ideation, design, development, and analytics.

LinkedIn

Expert from

Dronebase
Netsuite
Snap Inc
Julie DeForest

Julie DeForest

Head of Lifecycle

Julie is the Head of Lifecycle at Mavan and was previously a Senior Director of Email, Push & Affiliate Marketing at Overstock. For over 15 years, she's managed Lifecycle annualized P/L's that range from $200K to $1.3B and generated YOY growth of 35%+. From ecommerce, logistics, transportation and hospitality, she has launched & scaled lifecycle programs across multiple industries.

LinkedIn

Expert from

Braze
MGM
Overstock
Dez Safavi

Dez Safavi

Director of Sales & Partnerships

Dez has worked in business development for nearly 10 years, helping companies like AT&T, Sprint, MuteSix, and Operam acquire new business and establish long-lasting partnerships with clients. She is deeply skilled in assessing the unique needs of each business and works cross-functionally to build custom solutions for clients. At Operam, she built an entire sales department from scratch helping the agency grow their Direct-to-Consumer eCommerce division, resulting in over 40 new clients in 2.5 years.

LinkedIn

Expert from

Mutesix
Operam
T-Mobile
Chris Brophy

Chris Brophy

Director of Growth

Chris is a performance marketing expert with deep Facebook and Instagram experience. During his 4.5 years at MasterClass he helped 10x performance marketing budget while managing the top sales channel. He also worked directly with the COO, biz ops, and talent teams on market research projects that helped MasterClass identify and sign new top-selling instructors.

LinkedIn

Expert from

Masterclass
tradecraft
Upland Logistics
Kyle Shields

Kyle Shields

Creative Director - Art

Kyle is an internationally-awarded art director and designer. Along with his partner Aaron Peever, he’s helped launch 360 campaigns for brands like Mastercard, Wendy’s, Suncor, Scotiabank, AncestryDNA and Kia Motors. With 10 years of experience in digital media, broadcast, design, branding, illustration, UI/UX, and creative problem solving he brings a diverse set of skills to deliver results for any client problem. During their time McCann he and Aaron helped launch The Wendy’s Canada Mobile app, increased sign-ups for Suncor's loyalty program by over 100k users and more than doubled brand awareness for the CareMakers Foundation.

LinkedIn

Expert from

McCann
Bensimon Byrne
Innocean
Aaron Peever

Aaron Peever

Creative Director - Copywriting

Aaron is the copywriter half of his internationally-awarded creative team. With his partner Kyle Shields, he’s created campaigns for Mastercard, Wendy’s, Suncor, Scotiabank, and Kia. Aaron’s wheelhouse is finding exciting and unexpected creative solutions to client’s problems. While at McCann, he and Kyle turned a simple public service announcement brief into a 24-hour long interactive documentary film, increasing donations for the CareMakers Foundation by 1649% in the first month after launch. Before taking the plunge into creative advertising, Aaron spent nearly a decade as a comedy writer working on web series and performing across Canada and the United States.

LinkedIn

Expert from

McCann
Bensimon Byrne
Innocean
Zoey Corona

Zoey Corona

Zoey has worked in the paid advertising industry for the past 14 years on both performance and ad creative strategy. She’s helped establish and grow sales research, data support, and insights teams at Marin Software (where she was employee 50) and Ready Set. At Nanigans, she was the mobile gaming expert and advised many influential companies, such as Zynga, EA, and WB Games, on their paid social advertising strategy. At MAVAN she uses her love of driving value, forming genuine relationships, and building processes to deliver enterprise-level service as the Growth Operations Project Manager.

LinkedIn

Expert from

Marin
Nanigans
Ready Set
Rich Skinner

Rich Skinner

Rich has spent nearly 15 years developing groundbreaking data initiatives across several high-profile tech brands such as Zillow, Google, Pandora and Zynga. He has functional expertise in marketing, product, engineering, operations and representation. Most recently at Zillow, he helped drive YoY growth of agent DAU 40%+, engagement 20%+ while reducing operational costs through experimentation by over 25%. An avid advocate for representation, he also created several programs to aid Zillow in achieving a 10-14% improvement in its representation goals.

LinkedIn

Expert from

Pandora
Zillow
Google