As a young boy, I remember recording myself speaking english. Except it wasn't actually english. It "sounded" like english, so I thought. Let me explain.
In Romania when I was seven, and later in France, I was fascinated with cartoons and movies. I would watch them constantly and then recorded myself speaking some of the parts. Except, I didn't know how to speak english so I recorded gibberish that I thought sounded right. If only I could find those tapes!
So you can imagine that working at Warner Bros. Discovery is truly like a dream. So many of the movies and cartoons I ultimately learned english from were from this storied organization. It changed my life.
So how did I get here?
The short story is that I joined You.i TV in Ottawa after leaving my own app startup and part of the deal was that the company would move me and my family to Los Angeles. We made it happen and ultimately the startup was acquired by Warner Media ahead of the Warner/Discovery merger a year later.
A few months after the merger, I was presented with a stellar opportunity to take on the role of a lifetime as Director, Product Management - Technical (PM-T) for the Video Player SDK at Warner Bros. Discovery.
As soon as I met with the leaders of the org, I knew I had finally found my people and the perfect role. It is a deeply technical role that also leverages my love of people and building bridges and relationships across orgs and external partners.
A few months in, I was also given the green light to split my time between the player team and the ad tech team to help build a strong partnership between the orgs and also help usher in new advanced ads, a passion of mine when I was at You.i.
I've been so busy, I forgot to post a role update but the recent Barbie launch on Max was so beautifully done, I was reminded how fortunate I truly am to work here.
It has been a wild year. We launched Max in May, followed up with TNT Sports in Europe (as part of Discovery+) then added live news and sports to Max (CNN and Bleacher Report Sports) while also prepping for LATAM and EMEA launches in 2024 which includes a lot of sports and streaming of the summer Paris Olympics! I've always loved hard problems!
Maybe another young child who loves movies and cartoons will be inspired to pursue his or her dreams because of the work we do.
Many thanks to Jason Flick for believing in me at You.i (mostly people don't hire entrepreneurs) and Mark Ramberg Alan Ramaley Sudheer Sirivara Robyn Peterson Avi Saxena and all my colleagues across the org for trusting me and my team with the important role of doing our part to deliver moving pictures on screens globally.
Happy Holidays everyone!
“At Warner Bros. Discovery, one of our core values is to champion inclusion, and I can’t think of a better way to do that than to present the biggest movie of 2023 in American Sign Language.”
#Barbie with ASL debuts tomorrow on Max.
