Awecelot: A One-Man Band

Max is a product management executive, former founder, angel investor, and advisor, who has spent his career crafting, launching, and scaling platforms and products. He has experience creating marketplace ecosystems, mobile apps, social games, consumer sites, semantic tools, and media platforms. He focuses on developing products that delight users by embracing the elegance of simplicity to drive innovation and usability.

"I started Awecelot because I continued to work with startups and founders that faced the same challenges I had. Across all of these projects and with almost two decades of experience in product, I saw that it is critical to build institutional value and knowledge from the onset."

Max serves a Fellow at Columbia Business School’s Entrepreneurship Center and the Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards. He is also a mentor at the Robin Hood Foundation’s accelerator, the Center on Rural Innovation, and Founded Outdoors.

He also is devoted to his adopted home state of Vermont, where he serves on the board of the Foundation for Vermont State Parks and spends as much time out exploring in his camper as possible.

Max also works as an advisor to startups, which have included Clark (which was featured on Apple's "Planet of the Apps" and acquired by Noodle), Prevoty (acquired for $140mm by Imperva), and ShopDot.

Additionally, Max has led the conversation around the concept of “Happiness Debt” and the importance of quantifying the cost of individual fulfillment in the workplace. The original piece can be found here.

He has been awarded two patents (20100057701 & 20100058177) and also contributed to several open standards including OAuth and OpenID.

He graduated from Yale University in 2006 with a B.A. in Psychology.

Max has worked at both startups and larger companies including the BBC, Yahoo!, SpinMedia, Honest Buildings (acquired), Gravity (acquired), Myspace, and more.