Joe Golden

Joe Golden is currently the CEO of PerfectRec, a company they founded in March 2022. PerfectRec is focused on creating a personalized recommendation engine using the expertise of human product experts and machine learning. The company's initial focus is on smartphones, with plans to expand to other electronics and products.

Prior to founding PerfectRec, Joe served as the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Collage.com from November 2007 to April 2021. Collage.com is a platform that allows users to print photos on a variety of products and provides a seamless end-to-end experience. What started as a one-off project evolved into a successful business, taking up Joe's time and effort for approximately 6 years.

Joe also worked at Upwork as a Staff Economist from December 2013 to January 2015. Joe primarily focused on designing and analyzing product and marketing experiments, as well as market design questions related to monetization and pricing. During this time, Joe also completed their dissertation and wrote the 3rd chapter based on an experiment involving Google Search ads and their impact on competing companies.

Before their tenure at Upwork, Joe was an Economics Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Michigan from August 2009 to November 2014. Joe gained further industry experience as an Economic Analyst at Google. Joe interned with Hal Varian's Google Economics group in the summer of 2011 and then rejoined them in January 2012 for a part-time economics analyst position. Their responsibilities included creating statistical models, analyzing data, conducting surveys, and providing consulting services for various projects.

Joe's early career included working at Microsoft as a Software Design Engineer in Test from July 2007 to July 2009. Joe primarily worked on SharePoint, focusing initially on general software features before specializing in security and performance.

Additionally, Joe has had roles at the University of Michigan Math Department as a Course Assistant in 2006 and as a Physics Research Intern at Thermal Wave Imaging from May 2006 to August 2006. Their research at Thermal Wave Imaging involved non-destructive engineering techniques and developing software tools for modeling the heat equation.

Joe Golden earned a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in Math and Economics, with a double major, from the University of Michigan. Joe attended the university from 2003 to 2007. Following that, they pursued a Master of Arts (M.A.) degree in Economics from the University of Michigan, which they completed in 2011. Joe then continued their education at the University of Michigan and obtained a Ph.D. in Economics in 2014. In addition to their formal education, Joe also obtained a certification in Machine Learning from Coursera in July 2013.