I'm a designer and engineer based out of San Francisco, CA. I've cofounded three startups, consulted for many others, and led design at a major social network . Most recently, I cofounded aboutLife where I helped lay the foundation for how to fix retirement planning.
Corporate Bio
Michael Owens was most recently the Chief Product Officer of aboutLife . With a background in interaction design and full-stack software engineering, Michael drove aboutLife's product vision and execution for the first year and a half during which he and his cofounders successfully raised a multi-million dollar Series A round from KPCB Notion , building an app for discovering insights within your personal data.
Michael led the design team at hi5 Networks where he redesigned the virtual goods and social games systems used by 30M+ users monthly. While leading the team, he designed some of the company's most innovative products and features such as SocioPay, SocioPath, and Anonymous Social Gameplay. Additionally, he designed much of hi5's successor site, Magi, before moving on to start his own startup.
Michael has worked as a design and engineering consultant for such clients as Donna (by Incredible Labs , acquired by Yahoo! ), AT&T (for their Speech API DevLab ), TimePlay Entertainment , Marble Cloud Security , and several smaller startups such as Transcend Innovation , an educational startup in Chicago, and Twitpay one of the first social payments apps. Michael started in the industry as a one-person design and development shop for advertising and marketing agencies in Chicago and southern Alabama specializing in e-commerce and SEO.
Michael attended the University of South Alabama in a dual-degree Honors Program for Philosophy and Biomedical Sciences and was accepted to medical school straight out of high school as a part of the University's College of Medicine Early Acceptance Program. Ultimately, Michael decided medicine was not for him, and turned his interests in web design and development into his career.
