US content personalization and discovery startup Canopy has hired Spotify‘s Discover Weekly creator Matt Ogle and former New York Times Community Desk Editor Bassey Etim.
Canopy launched in 2018 and is focused on discovery, ‘without ever revealing [users’] personal data’.
The platform uses on-device machine learning to predict what content users will like.
The company has offices in New York and Boston.
At Canopy, Ogle (pictured right) and Etim (pictured left) will focus on developing a new technical architecture that protects personal data and delivers a personalized content experience.
They will both be based in the company’s Brooklyn office.
Ogle joins Canopy from Instagram, where he worked across multiple teams and products – most recently Explore and Hashtags – to build features that help people discover their interests within Instagram’s community of over 1 billion users.
Prior to Instagram, Matt was a Product Director at Spotify responsible for launching Spotify’s personalization and discovery features including Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mix.
Ogle will be leading the overall consumer product strategy for Canopy as it develops a broader private personalization architecture.
Bassey Etim is an artist, journalist, and technology manager.
He spent the last 10 years as the Community Desk Editor at The New York Times.
He managed the 16-person community management desk within the Times newsroom and was the editorial head of the Times’ Community development team.
Bassey will lead development of the voice of Canopy’s recommendation architecture.
“At Canopy, we are working on something entirely new in the world of personalization and discovery,” said the company, in a blog post published yesterday (January 15).
“The addition of Bassey and Matt to the team will help us achieve our ambitious goals and show the world that you can do things differently through a combination of technology and human curation.”
Canopy
“The addition of Bassey and Matt to the team will help us achieve our ambitious goals and show the world that you can do things differently through a combination of technology and human curation.”
“We believe privacy and personalization should have been built into the Internet from the beginning: with users in control of what they discover and how.
“We are developing a new kind of architecture, but also a new kind of company that optimizes for delight and discovery.”Music Business Worldwide
