Location Los Angeles, California, United States Regions Greater Los Angeles Area, West Coast, Western US Gender Male
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Douglas Merrill is a former Co-Founder and CEO of ZestFinance, a financial technology company that uses machine learning and data science to help companies make more accurate financial decisions. In 2009, Douglas started ZestFinance with a hypothesis: Google-like algorithms could be applied to make consumer credit more transparent, available to
more people, and significantly less expensive. ZestFinance’s team of crazy smart data scientists and mathematicians are united by a unique mission: to enable fair and transparent credit for everyone.
As the former CIO and VP of Engineering at Google, Douglas led an organization of 1,500, oversaw all aspects of internal engineering and technology, and drove multiple strategic efforts, including Google’s unique IPO auction in 2004. He has also served as COO of New Music at EMI Group, and as SVP of Infrastructure and HR Strategy at Charles Schwab. In academia, he was an Information Scientist at the RAND Corporation.
Douglas holds a Ph.D. in cognitive science from Princeton and is the author of Getting Organized in the Google Era: How to Get Stuff Out of Your Head, Find It When You Need It, and Get It Done Right. He regularly posts to his blog The Math Matters and has written articles for Harvard Business Review, WIRED and Forbes.
