About

I’m Jake. I build things and write about what I learn.

I’ve spent the last decade at the intersection of product, data, and money — figuring out how systems grow, how pricing actually works at scale, and increasingly, how AI is reshaping all of it. I’ve shipped products at Google and LinkedIn, built analytics infrastructure that influenced nine-figure decisions at Venmo, and spent enough time in the weeds of experimentation and causal inference to have strong opinions about when A/B testing is the wrong tool.

These days I’m at LinkedIn working on Marketing Solutions — the ads and monetization platform that helps businesses reach professionals at scale. Before that, Google — Core Engineering and Google Pay. I went to Columbia for a graduate degree in Operations Research because I wanted to understand the math behind decisions, not just the intuition.

What I Actually Think About

The credential story is nice, but what actually gets me out of bed is: what can you build with this?

I’ve been obsessed with AI since before it was fashionable — running notebooks on stock data, stitching together LLM APIs, trying to turn parenting books into chatbots that actually help sleep-deprived parents. Some of it worked. Most of it didn’t. All of it taught me something.

My honest view: the companies and people who win in the next decade won’t be the ones who read the most about AI. They’ll be the ones who shipped the most things with it, learned from what failed, and iterated faster than anyone else. This blog is my version of doing that in public.

What I’m Good At

Building from zero to one in complex domains — pricing systems, monetization platforms, data infrastructure — where the hard part isn’t the technology, it’s knowing what to measure and what decisions to actually make. Getting cross-functional teams aligned on ambiguous problems. Translating between the language engineers speak and the language executives hear.

And lately: using AI as a force multiplier for all of it.

Connect

Email: jakexshi@gmail.com
X: @jakexshi
GitHub: jakeshi

I’m happy to talk product strategy, pricing systems, AI tools, or anything you’re building.