Richard Rabbat
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ph.D., Communication Networks 1998-09-01 - 2001-06-01
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
M.S., Information Technology 1996-09-01 - 1998-06-01
American University of Beirut
M.S., Computer and Communications Engineering 1994-10-01 - 1996-06-01
American University of Beirut
B.S., Computer and Communications Engineering 1990-10-01 - 1994-06-01
Lycée Lafolie Saint-James
High School Diploma, Mathematics 1989-10-01 - 1990-07-01Work Experience
Lighty AI
Current
Lighty AI
MIT Kuo Sharper Center for Prosperity and Entrepreneurship
2023-09-01 - 2024-10-01
MIT Kuo Sharper Center for Prosperity and Entrepreneurship
Edge Delta
2023-02-01 - 2023-08-01
Edge Delta
2019-09-01 - 2023-02-01
StartX
2015-05-01 - 2019-10-01
StartX
Gfycat (acquired by Snap Inc)
2015-07-01 - 2019-09-01
Gfycat (acquired by Snap Inc)
Tango
2013-06-01 - 2015-07-01
Tango
Zynga
2011-07-01 - 2013-06-01
Zynga
2006-11-01 - 2011-07-01
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2005-01-01 - 2008-05-01
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Skills
Summary
Product Management executive with deep experience in search, messaging, ads and video. Co-founder, CEO of Gfycat, largest GIF platform (top 60 US site). Raised massive $10M seed. Started ad monetization at Tango. Founded team, built and operated ad platform. Grew revenue to be largest revenue operation at Tango. Created native ad format later adopted by IAB as standard. Built the most successful game at Tango: Road Riot (35M downloads, 1M DAU) Improved Zynga Cityville monetization by 13%. Created SDKs to provide a SaaS platform for gaming including analytics, social, storage, leaderboards, on all platforms. Product lead for the Google initiative to Make the web faster. Added the speed signal to Google's search algorithm. Improved monetization for AdSense on mobile by 10% and increased run rate for AdSense by $50 MM. Created analytics products for performance (Page Speed) that enable webmasters and web developers to speed their sites and increase their revenue. Delivered monetization improvement for About.com (a New York Times company) and Edmunds.com. Built a team that created a speed module for the Apache HTTP Server and partnered with the largest hosting provider (Go Daddy) on its successful deployment. Worked closely with the video and Chrome teams to create a new image format WebP, to replace JPEG and GIF. WebP has been adopted by Facebook, Firefox, GMail and Netflix among others. WebP was highlighted in "20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web", Official Honoree in three categories in the 2011 Webby Awards. Worked on HTML5 standardization and helped set up the Web Performance Group in the W3C.
