Phil Getzen

Build vs. buy vs. partner?At Disney, I negotiated platform deals with Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple TV, and Meta. I've evaluated RFPs with partners like Snap for major features and worked with leadership to recommend buy vs. partner approaches when 8-figure decisions were on the line.

Unit economics? At ESPN, we worked through complex tradeoffs between maintaining and growing our TV Everywhere business while expanding DTC offerings with ESPN+ and ESPN Direct.

Feature bloat?At Twitter, I worked with partner teams to effectively prioritize the highest-value video products that aligned with overall company goals, saying no to features that didn't move the needle despite internal pressure.

There's a difference between a feature that works for 1,000 users and one that works for 100 million users. I've shipped both. At Twitter, I launched a unified video player framework impacting 100M+ daily active users. At ESPN, I led products that scaled to millions of concurrent viewers during major live events. I know which architectural decisions matter at which stage, when to take on technical debt vs. when to pay it down.

Mid-market organizations don't have Disney's resources or Twitter's extensive engineering teams. You can't afford to build everything in-house, but you also can't afford to bet wrong on platform partners. I help you make strategic choices that fit your actual constraints, not idealized versions of what you wish you had.

Enterprise B2B (Microsoft), consumer social (Twitter), streaming media (Disney/ESPN), consumer mobile apps (TempoRun), and education non-profits (Gique). This breadth means I can translate lessons from one domain to another, and I know when advice from one vertical doesn't apply to yours.