About Me

Product Manager & Builder

Hello there. My name is Ari and welcome to my personal website!

I work in Product at Fetch Rewards. Prior to joining Fetch, I was a Group Product Manager at Google, where I spent almost 13 years leading teams that developed products ranging from systems to process legal requests from global law enforcement agencies to delivering innovative solutions to large digital advertisers and publishers. Before Google, I worked at a variety of startups and small media companies across the SMB SaaS, social networking, publishing, Ad Tech, and video game spaces.

During the early 1990s, I got into game development by teaching myself pixel-art and animation and went on to create SpriteLib, a free collection of pre-drawn 2D game artwork that has been featured in a number of programming books over the past 25 years. In the early 2000s, I was part of the team that released a series of popular Windows games (ZapSpot) and contributed to several others via my SpriteLib library. I also wrote two computer trade books (book 1 and book 2) and created the artwork and animation for several early mobile phone games (some examples are shown below in their actual size):

Example of my pixel art Example of my pixel art Example of my pixel art Another example of my pixel art

My passions include spending time with my family, retro computing, mentoring junior Product Managers, consuming dystopian science fiction (Soylent Green anyone?), re-watching classic 80s movies, learning more about specific historical periods and their influence on society, curating my 2400+ track Spotify playlist on all things post-punk / punk / new wave / alternative music, and writing occasionally useful Mac apps.