Mehrdad Fatourechi
What are your main responsibilities or activities in your current position?
I am currently the CTO of BroadbandTV Corp (BBTV), a leading digital entertainment company in Canada, focusing on building tools to help content creators. In the past few years, I have been mostly responsible for shaping the product vision, strategic product management, strategic program management and innovation management at BBTV. This has led to building a number of ground-breaking products for content creators including our flagship web applications, "VISO Catalyst" and "VISO NOVI". In particular, under my leadership, we've designed and built several patent-pending products including modules to optimize metadata/thumbnails of videos on YouTube, finding collaborators for content creators, tools for discovering and efficiently managing pirated videos and providing easy-to-understand actionable insights for our clients, amongst many others. In order to achieve the above goals, I've built and managed a team of more than 30 bright & talented professionals [researchers, developers (mostly LAMP stack), user experience and user interface designers, QA engineers, IT specialists and product/project/team managers. This hard-working and dedicated team has been working very hard to deliver the maximum value for the business.
How does your current work relate to your graduate degree?
My machine learning background has helped me a lot in order to build intelligent machine learning solutions to help out content creators. My current work, in particular, is related to the post-doc work that I did at UBC (image and video processing).
What do you like and what do you find challenging about your current position?
Trying to stay ahead of the curve in a very hot industry (digital video) that is constantly evolving. Ensuring that the team's productivity is at the highest to meet the aggressive business goals while their morale and happiness level is as high as possible.
Is your current career path as you originally intended?
I always wanted to lead the tech vision in a challenging industry and I'm glad that I've achieved that at BBTV.
What motivated you to pursue graduate work at UBC?
UBC's ranking and feedback from the friends who had already studied at UBC.
What key things did you do, or what attitudes or approaches did you have, that contributed to your success?
I'm very pragmatic; I want to solve a business problem and as such, sometimes compromises need to be made. I try to be as honest as possible with my team members, thus build a culture of trust and mutual respect.
What is your best piece of advice for current graduate students preparing for their future careers?
Do what you are passionate about and not necessarily what is currently hot in the market or your parents/friends want you to do. Learn to code and figure out what the industry really wants. Look for a company where you feel you will love the culture.
How did you find out about/obtain your current position?
BBTV was the industrial partner of UBC for one of our NSERC grants and they asked me to join them first as a scientific adviser and later as a full-time employee.
How are jobs normally posted and filled in your organization or industry?
Through referrals and the BBTV career webpage. Also LinkedIn.