Jacob is the Founder and CEO of Relay.app. Prior to founding Relay.app, Jacob was a Director of Product Management at Google, where he led the product teams for Gmail, Google Calendar, and several other Google Workspace products. Before that, Jacob was the Co-founder and CEO of Timeful (acquired by Google in 2015), a smart calendar that leveraged insights from behavioral psychology and AI to help people spend time on their most important priorities. He has a BA in Computer Science from Cornell University and was pursuing a PhD in the AI Lab at Stanford before dropping out to found Timeful.

I've spent two decades navigating product leadership at companies where getting product strategy wrong means missing quarters, not just missing deadlines. At Sony, Qualcomm, and T-Mobile, I learned that successful product implementation isn't about the technology - it's about the leadership.

That's why my approach is different. While others teach you to use AI tools, I teach you to think strategically about AI transformation. The frameworks I've developed come from actually leading teams through technological shifts that determined company trajectories.

I currently teach Strategy at University of Washington and Seattle University because the next generation of business leaders needs to understand something their professors don't: AI isn't a technical problem requiring technical solutions. It's a strategic challenge requiring strategic leadership.

The product managers getting promoted for AI leadership aren't the ones who know the most about machine learning. They're the ones who understand how to position AI initiatives, build AI-capable teams, and navigate organizational change.