Neal Varner

About Neal Varner

As an executive product leader with over 15 years of experience, I specialize in delivering AI-driven products and platforms that simplify complex problems across consumer, SMB, and enterprise markets. My passion is leading organizations through innovative product visions and strategies that drive market leadership.At BENlabs, I led significant revenue growth, helping the company surpass $150M in annual revenue during my 3.5-year tenure. As the first product leadership hire, I facilitated executive leadership sessions to define our strategy, authored the product vision, and scaled my team to 17 designers, ops, and product leaders. I also expanded the tech organization from around 15 to over 100 employees, all while maintaining an 86% high job satisfaction rate. A key driver of our success was staying close to customers—we conducted over 500 customer interviews and formed industry partnerships to ensure we built products that met real customer needs.At Ancestry, I reversed negative subscriber growth by deploying personalized search and recommendation experiences. One of my best wins was increasing subscribers from lifecycle emails by over 500%. I also founded the world’s first DNA-evidenced family tree experience, Thrulines. A customer called Thrulines \"one of the greatest innovations on Ancestry,\" noting that it allows them to \"research in a couple of hours what would have taken a decade.\"In addition to my product leadership career, I invest in commercial real estate, focusing on multifamily properties and online businesses. For these investments, I develop financial models to stress test opportunities using Monte Carlo simulations, sharpening my strategic planning and financial analysis skills.Earlier, I co-founded Harrison Capital, where I raised equity and investment capital and developed a fully automated AI investment platform for our commodity hedge fund, achieving expected average returns of 18% with less than a 2% drawdown across 99% of 5+ billion evaluated scenarios. At Predictive Science, I led a product research team as a Data Scientist to build real-time search and sentiment models, increasing topic discoverability and saving clients over 55% in data expenses.I’m passionate about leveraging AI to enhance multifamily real estate operations as I explore leadership opportunities in PropTech or real estate technology. That said, I’m open to opportunities where my AI expertise can drive innovation in B2B and B2C environments. My goal is to build and scale organizations that exceed customer expectations and drive business results.

Experience

1. Director of Product, Data & Ai

   BambooHR

   Jan 2025 — Present · Lehi, UT, US

   Continuously improving HR & leadership practices with BambooHR\'s AI & Business Intelligence experiences- Leading the product organization\'s transition to an agentic product development cycle

Education

• Brigham Young University

  Bachelor's Degree, Management Information Systems, General

  2008 — 2013

Skills

• Sql
• Database Design
• Data Mining
• Python
• Trading Systems
• Problem Solving
• Scientific Data Management
• Data Structures
• Data Analysis
• Trading
• Team Leadership
• Financial Analysis
• Java
• Machine Learning
• Programming
• Microsoft Office
• Public Speaking
• Applied Mathematics
• Leadership
• Php
• Access
• Mysql
• Management
• Powerpoint
• Microsoft Excel
• Analysis