Our Story

Rival is a company that was founded on the idea that by using technology and design we can reshape the major live events experience from the ground up. By doing so we can connect Teams and Artists with their fans, keep fans safe, and give teams ways to make more money. The technology used to operate arenas and stadiums hasn’t evolved for 20 years. There was clear opportunity to change this by building a Saas platform that could tie directly to our consumer experience, giving venues the intelligence to operate like a modern day business. To do so we’d need vision, a killer team, a runway that you don’t see with most startups.

Our Investors

Along with teams from

I joined Rival in November 2016 as employee #6, and taking on the Head of Design role. My time has mostly been split between creating a vision for what the future of live events might look like, keeping the engineering team well fed with UX to build today, and managerial duties related to building a Design team that values quality, collaboration and speed. The great part about working in an industry that is in live events is that the “User Experience” is not only digital, but physical and spacial. Its about connecting all aspects to make a cohesive journey.

As the first design hire at Rival, I have:

• Taken on the Head of Product Design role.

• Set a rigorous recruiting process that eliminates bias.

• Hired 3 talented user experience designers.

• Developed a UX process that is integrated with the technology team.

• Establish a partnership with our product managers.

• Created design organization routines such as daily stand-ups, design reviews, and planning meetings.

• Selected our team’s design, prototyping, and project management software.

• Fostered a culture of collaboration and iteration with our engineering team.

• Prepared guideline documentation on how to be successful as a UX Designer at Rival.

With my team I have:

• Designed a brand: logo, a voice, and collateral.

• Supported 3 key product areas:
  Enterprise, Consumer, and Security/Access management.

• Performed hundreds of hours of research in the field and with our clients.

• Developed the Rival Design Principles, a guide for the company to understand the values we hold when designing great user experiences.

• A component library internally known as “the Fabric Design System”, and then worked with our Devs to build the “Rival React Components”.

• Established user testing protocols and made it part of our process.

• Prepared our Series-B investor deck, our Series-C deck, and Sales deck.

• Incubated war-room style workshops to dream up the future of live events and the fan experience..