Meet Our Members: Rand Fitzpatrick of OKCupid Labs

 

Rand Fitzpatrick, Chief Product Officer, OKCupid Labs

Why did you choose to become a Hub LA member?
I decided to join the Hub and build my team here for several reasons: 1) I believe in helping to build a thriving LA ecosystem of makers - designers, developers, and creators of all stripes - and that requires some physical adjacency. 2) Downtown (especially the Arts District) has a great creative history and can serve as an important East Side anchor to balance against the current dominance of the Santa Monica start-up distribution. 3) I feel that people on this side of town are more focused in making things, rather than fixating on being part of some scene or living a particular lifestyle - this earnestness and willingness to walk the walk are critical to the type of community I want to help foster. 4) The leadership of the Hub has done an admirable job of seeding the community, creating great opportunities, and providing a beautiful start to a new locus of creative excellence in LA.

What are you most excited about regarding your Hub LA membership and the Hub LA space?
I am looking forward to being an active participant in the local community - both teaching and learning from others in the ecosystem, especially around areas such as design, machine learning, natural language processing, and system architecture (where my team and I have the ability to offer solid guidance). I am also excited and curious to see what endeavors thrive in this space, and how the community evolves over the next few months and years.

What are some of your new business goals that you hope to achieve or ways in which you hope to grow now that you are a Hub member?
I suppose I’d like to be able to partner with other community members, if and when that makes sense, and I would like to be able to roll out some of my team’s open source tools and resources to others in the community.

What’s your idea of a perfect LA day (given that you have a jetpack and don’t have to sit in traffic)? Don’t forget to include your favorite spot for a bite of food!
Waking up before sunrise to either run in Runyon Canyon or to train acrobatics on the bars and rings at Santa Monica beach, followed by a nice design session over coffee at Coffee Commissary… and then still making it into the office before my team. Working with my team on novel ways of yielding real insight and value from data, and providing those tools and systems to our users. Then, leaving to watch the sunset from Angeles Crest.

To discover more about Rand or Rand’s work, check out OKCupid Labs.

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