Bio
Erick Watson
I help AI labs, Web3 protocols, and venture studios turn frontier research into products people use. As a fractional CPO through SproutVest, I embed with founding teams for 6–12 months to define product lines, build go-to-market strategies, and ship. Member of the Toptal network (top 3% of freelance product managers).
Track Record
$1.33B+ in documented revenue impact across direct and consulting engagements. $1.22B incremental ARR at Google. 34M+ users served at Elevance Health. $12M+ in B2B sales at Quantarium. $24.3M raised across multiple ventures. 4 exits, including acquisitions by Interos.ai and corporate spin-outs. 2 patents granted. 300+ ML competitions launched on CodaLab at Microsoft.
Career & Fractional CPO Experience
SproutVest (Founder & Managing Director, 2013–Present) — Fractional CPO and venture strategy firm specializing in AI, blockchain, and SaaS commercialization. Clients include Google, Microsoft, Elevance Health, Angi, Protocol Labs, ASU, and others. See case studies.
Chainlodge (Co-Founder & CFO, 2018–Present) — Data center real estate investment vehicle in Okanogan, Washington. Led product design, investor positioning, and bilingual (EN/ZH) outreach for a 5+ MW riverfront campus targeting AI compute, HPC, and cloud infrastructure workloads.
Randamu (Co-Founder & CEO, 2023–2025) — Spun out of Protocol Labs to build threshold cryptography infrastructure for Web3. Raised $3.3M, shipped dcipher.network to production across Cosmos, Filecoin, and Ethereum L2s. Presented at Consensus 2025, Permissionless IV, and Token2049.
Protocol Labs (Entrepreneur-in-Residence, 2023–2024) — Commercialized drand, transforming a research-grade cryptography project into a market-ready decentralized service powering verifiable randomness and trustless automation across Web3, gaming, and AI applications.
Angi (Principal Product Manager, 2022–2023) — Increased website conversion by 8%, generating tens of millions in additional annual gross revenue. Reduced abandonment by 3%. Built a data science experimentation framework for rapid SEM prototyping and A/B testing.
Google (Senior PM, 2021–2022) — Led Search Advertising product driving $1.22B in incremental ARR. Integrated AI/ML into advertiser workflows with a 20+ person cross-functional team.
Elevance Health (Principal Digital PM, 2019–2020) — Led product and DevOps for identity and access management supporting 34M+ members. Improved adoption by 10%, member CSAT by 7%, and reduced inbound call volume by 6% year-over-year.
Quantarium (Chief Product Officer, 2017–2019) — Built the top-ranked AI valuation platform for real estate, covering 105M U.S. households. Generated $12M+ in AWS Marketplace sales. Managed a team of 8 and a $10M P&L. Led corporate spin-out and acquisition.
Trensant (Co-Founder & CPO, 2015–2017) — Predictive analytics using NLP and graph databases. Raised $6M. Predicted the 2016 U.S. election by one electoral vote. Acquired by Interos.ai.
G.A.E.M.S. (Non-Executive Director, 2015–2016) — Board advisor overseeing finance committee, raising $15M in debt financing for supply chain and manufacturing. Led CEO search and executive compensation committees.
Microsoft (Principal PM, AI & ML, 2013–2015) — Led technical program management for AI and machine learning at Microsoft Research. Built CodaLab, the open-source ML competition platform used by NeurIPS and ICML. Hosted 300+ ML competitions. Grew community from zero to 3,000+ members.
Metavana (Co-Founder & Director, 2011–2013) — First Net Promoter Score SaaS API. Named Gartner 2013 Cool Vendor in content and social analytics.
Microsoft (Director, Business Strategy, 2010–2011) — Ran a $150M P&L and 130-person team in Beijing. Grew Microsoft’s China partner ecosystem investment by 33% ($50M). Established partnerships for Microsoft Research Asia in product development and technology transfer.
Education & Credentials
Louisiana State University — Bachelor’s Degree in Linguistics (1993). Google Ads Search Certification. Google Analytics Certification. Coursera Executive Data Science Specialization. Languages: English (native), Chinese (working proficiency), German (working proficiency).
Speaking
Frequent speaker at industry conferences on threshold cryptography, Web3 infrastructure, AI product strategy, and venture building. Recent stages include Consensus 2025, Token2049, Permissionless IV, and Devcon.
See the full Appearances archive.