Tyler Spalding

Tyler Spalding, (b. February 9, 1980) is an entrepreneur based out of Chicago, IL. He is currently the Chief Strategy Officer of Raise.com, previously founder and CEO of TasteBud Technologies (formerly Styleseek).^[1][2][3]

Education

Spalding graduated from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2001 with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. He later attended the Sloan School of Business at MIT, graduating in 2011.^[3][4][5]

Career

After graduating from Urbana-Champaign, Spalding was an engineer with NASA, and also worked at Lockheed Martin on the space shuttle program for over 3 years.^[6]

In that time he was also a faculty member at both the University of Miami and the University of Alabama in the engineering departments.^[7][8][9]

Entrepreneurship

Spalding transferred his expertise in algorithms and engineering to the world of eCommerce when he started Styleseek with Sloan MIT colleague Chris Walti and Brian Hawkins of the Fashion Institute in 2010.^[10] He speaks around his "a-ha" moment to move from NASA to business school and entreprenuerial life when he realised he could "create change" through the work he was doing and that was what a startup was to him.^[11]

The goal of the service was to create personalised “StyleDNA” for menswear, an underserviced market in terms of personalization.^[12] The service was positioned as the “Pandora for eCommerce.” Spalding and Styleseek raised $1.75 million in seed funding, in 2 rounds from the likes of Cedar Capital, Jumpstart Ventures, Jeff Cantalupo, Padova Investments and other parties.^{[13][14][15][16][17]}

Styleseek then became Tastebud Technologies, a business-to-business model which focused on the predictive technologies Styleseek was based on rather than the platform itself, partnering with malls and retailers to understand consumer preferences and behavior to deliver targeted deals to mobile customers.^[18]

In 2015, Tastebud was acquired by Raise.com for an undisclosed amount and Spalding took on the role of Chief Strategic Officer of Raise.com.^{[19][20][21][22]}

Speaking

Spalding has spoken around and been interviewed on Internet privacy, entrepreneurship and eCommerce.^{[23][24][25][26]} He defines himself as a typical "nerd" and has a "pay it forward" mentaility, with interests in helping other entreprenuers.^[11] Spalding has also spoken around Tastebud specifically and case studies around that work, specifically around data and beacon technology in a physical consumer shopping environment.^[27] His public stance on tracking, data collection and privacy policies is to default to opt-in processes rather than opt-out.^[9]

References

External links

• Official website