Ashley Neale

Seattle, WA, USA | hello@thisisashley.com | 512-577-0308 | in/ashkford

SUMMARY

Proven track record with an 8+ year career launching innovative solutions, driving user engagement, and collaborating across teams. Passionate about leveraging cutting-edge technology to solve customer problems and optimize product success.

PRIOR EXPERIENCE

Founder & CEO

Proof of Peach, INC

November 2022 - January 2024

  • Secured over $1M in funding from 30+ investors, driving confidence through strategic pitches and stakeholder management.
  • Led monthly board meetings to align priorities, manage expectations, and deliver consistent product updates with urgency, all while navigating a lean budget.
  • Pioneered and executed a comprehensive AI safety strategy for the LLM, establishing the app as the market's only fully legally compliant and ethical AI companionship platform, which led to a Guardian News Article Feature and a 2000% uptick in revenue and users, surpassing annual business goals.
  • Leveraged user feedback to refine product strategy, combining strong product intuition with deep AI expertise to craft a long-term vision.
  • Delivered an MVP in under 90 days, and used user feedback to iterate with bi-weekly feature updates over 1.5 years, driving continuous innovation and increasing user retention from 1.2%-4.2%.
  • Managed 10+ external partnerships with B2B companies that are used in the technical stack, from inception to implementation.
  • Spearheaded executive-level decisions to optimize operational frameworks, resulting in 4 teams operating cross-functionally while leveraging agile methodologies and data-driven insights.

Co-Founder & Head of Product - Technical

Degenerate Ape Academy

August 2021 - March 2023

  • Drove alignment between the design, engineering, Sales, Marketing and leadership teams to build out coherent product features, business, and evangelism strategies, generating $500K+ in new revenue streams.
  • Designed and implemented strategies including A/B testing, AGILE methodologies, bug reporting, and applied user research, driving a 60% spike in daily users.
  • These scalable mechanisms became foundational, adopted for all current and future projects, and remain integral to the team's success today.
  • Transformed complex technical product challenges into actionable technical solutions, spearheading the launch of an auction platform that generated $360K in eight weeks, with >4500 users weekly.
  • Developed a groundbreaking on-chain open-source contract, driving $200K in revenue within two weeks, while establishing a scalable framework for the team to deliver future immersive experiences.

Program Manager, Developer Relations - Technical

NEAR Protocol

November 2019 - June 2021

  • Crafted and executed the DevRel team's GTM strategy, securing leadership buy-in and orchestrating cross-functional collaboration with developers, designers, finance, and legal teams.
  • Conceptualized, branded, designed, and launched developer tools, including an open-source marketplace standard, now forked and implemented into full products >10 times by the NEAR developer community.
  • Drove the product vision, strategy, and execution for 80+ developers; including building and announcing products, providing internal and external developer documentation, and establishing a cohesive, scalable foundation that empowered innovation and streamlined engagement across the community of 2000+ developers.
  • Integrated emerging technologies to create new features and processes, enhancing decision-making with robust data collection.
  • Championed the adoption of a privacy-focused, compliant in-house CRM, securing leadership buy-in and boosting closed partnerships by 40%.
  • Scaled the team from 10 to 120+ employees in under 1.5 years through interviewing and hiring top talent.
  • Led operations for internal culture initiatives and organized a two-week global offsite for 80 team members, delivering an impactful experience and internal hackathon within an $80K budget.

SKILLS

  • Technical Expertise: Jira, Asana, Click-up, BaseCamp, Airtable, Mixpanel, Datawisp, Zapier, web3, AI Models (Diffusion/Flux, LLMs), SQL analytics, Data Science
  • Leadership: Team management, stakeholder communication, cross-functional collaboration
  • Product Management: Roadmapping, Prioritization, User Research, KPI tracking, A/B Testing, AGILE, Budget Management, Product Requirements, User Stories, Technical Acceptance Criteria, 1/3/5 Year Product Roadmaps, DEI