Meet The Team

The Baotris team comprises a group of professionals with diverse expertise, including marketing and data specialists, project managers, social media experts, financial planners, researchers, analysts, designers, and writers.

Despite being a remote-first team, we place great emphasis on collaboration and teamwork. Our core values include fair compensation, continuous professional and personal development, and a strong sense of community.

Every quarter, we hold in-person meetings where we indulge in a shared love for food. However, what truly sets us apart is our unwavering passion for the work we do, the challenges we tackle, and the people we work with, be it colleagues or clients. Above all, we are deeply passionate about data and the infinite possibilities it offers.

Co Founder & CEO

John Cheng

John Cheng is the co-founder and CEO of Baotris. With a strong background in building sophisticated data products for large companies, John was inspired to found Baotris so smaller brands could realize and leverage those same competitive advantages.

Prior to co-founding Baotris, John was General Manager of Unity Analytics, where he led the growth of the data platform to 1.5 billion users. Prior to that, he co founded Playnomics, which was acquired by Unity. John holds an MBA in Marketing & Technology from Kellogg and a BA in Business Administration from UC Berkeley.

Co Founder & CTO

Michael Birk

Michael Birk is the co-founder and CTO of Baotris, where he helps ecommerce businesses to leverage data and technology to fuel their growth. Michael brings over two decades of engineering experience, most recently as Director of Engineering at Unity Technologies, where he scaled the analytics engineering team from a small handful to more than 40 full-time engineers. Prior to that, Michael worked with John Cheng at Playnomics and helped guide the company through the acquisition by Unity.

Michael has a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Director of Operations + Organic Marketing

Kajal Ford

Kajal Ford heads up Baotris’ internal People and Financial operations, as well as Top of Funnel Ecommerce Marketing for clients, including Influencer, Affiliate, Content, and Ecommerce SEO initiatives.

Previously, Kajal has managed global operations teams at unicorn tech companies Unity Technologies and Intercom. She scaled Onboarding and Engagement programs at early stage start-up Solv Health while they doubled in size, and helped project manage the Ticketfly operations merger as a result of the Pandora acquisition.

Kajal brings over 12 years experience overseeing business operations and logistics, and over 15 years in event management and production.

Brand Director

Gabriela Lucas

Gabriela Lucas is one of the Brand Directors at Baotris. She owns a portfolio of brands and manages their growth by working closely with Baotris’ team of marketing specialists, engineers, and strategy experts to implement data-driven strategies via Baotris’ proprietary playbook built to take brands to the next level.

Previously, Gabi has successfully managed the brand expansion strategy of several international luxury brands such as Istituto Marangoni, by establishing new consumer touch points while growing the brands’ US market share, both online and offline.

Baotris Advisor

Angelo Ferro

Prior to Baotris, Angelo was a Director of Business Development for Unity Analytics. In that role he helped developers understand and analyze their data to improve their customer's experience. As a Baotris advisor he shares his data expertise with portfolio brands. In his spare time he enjoys fashion, interior design and floristry.

Social Media and SEO Specialist

Seema Rao

Prior to Baotris, Seema was in the arts and culture sector. She's worked in social media and digital content for more than 20 years. In her various roles, she's helped organizations communicate complicated ideas succinctly in order to improve customer experience. At Baotris, she brings content expertise with portfolio brands to improve their social media and affiliate marketing. In her spare time, she's a TikTok influencer and crafter.

Advisor

Ray Wang

Ray Wang spent 3.5 years as a product manager at Baotris before transitioning into a strategic advisor. His focus is centered around Baotris' core products designed to help inject data and persona development into our portfolio's marketing roadmaps to drive sustainable year-over-year growth.

Prior to Baotris, Ray worked as a software engineer at Unity Technologies where he spearheaded projects focused on AI and Analytics for a data platform with billions of users. He is well-versed in instrumenting granular event tracking to surface key insights instead of mundane and difficult-to-interpret dashboards.

Ray’s technical background, coupled with his ability to navigate complex datasets, makes him uniquely suited to incorporate data in roadmap decisions both internally and externally.

Graphic Designer

Brandon Lee

Brandon Lee works as a graphic design consultant for Baotris, leveraging his experience in high-level design thinking to bring success to their various brands. He works closely with Baotris clients to produce high-quality design collateral for paid ad channels and fine-tunes their Shopify pages to optimize the user journey and increase sales.