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Adam Tratt

Adam Tratt (born 1972) is a technology entrepreneur. He is currently a cofounder and CEO of Haiku Deck, a Seattle based startup. He was a Product Manager on the Microsoft Office team between 1994 and 1997. He later was one of the first employees of Cranium, Inc. the board game company that was later purchased by Hasbro, Inc.

Contents Early Life and Education
 * 1 Biography
 * 1.1 Personal life

Tratt grew up in Barnstable, Massachusetts, a town on Cape Cod and lived there with his family until he was 18. He spent his junior year of High School serving as a Congressional page in Washington DC both as a House and a Senate page. He graduated from Tufts University with a degree in International Relations. He spent a year studying in Niamey, Niger during his time at Tufts.

Early Career

Tratt moved to Seattle and started at Microsoft in 1994 as a Product Manager in the Office group. During his time at Microsoft, he launched Microsoft’s first internet product, Internet Assistant for Microsoft Word which allowed documents created in Microsoft Word to be saved as HTML. Tratt also worked on efforts to market Microsoft office to the legal industry until 1997.

Tratt was recruited to work at iCat, an early provider of e-commerce tools where he served as product manager until 1998. In this role, Tratt worked on Lemonade Stand, a web-based tool that allowed small businesses to sell products online.

In 1998 he joined co-founders Richard Tait and Whit Alexander as one of the first employees of Cranium, Inc. a board game company. Tratt helped launch the brand in the US. He later led international marketing, bringing the brand to two dozen international markets around the world. Tratt was also GM of Cranium’s Canadian business. Cranium, Inc. went on to win over 130 awards and sell over 22 million games, books, and toys.[i]

Tratt also served as Director of Marketing for iShip.com and Stamps.com as well as Senior Vice President of Brand Development for marketing agency, MRY.

Haiku Deck

In 2010 Tratt joined the Techstars Seattle accelerator for technology entrepreneurs. Here he met designer Kyle Kesterson and CTO Kevin Leneway, his co-founders on what was initially called Giant Thinkwell. The company raised a seed round of $600,000 from investors in April, 2011.[ii] Giant Thinkwell produced celebrity-based Facebook games including, Mix-n-Match with Sir Mixalot. Their initial concept was a commercial failure which led the team into a series of pivots and ultimately the departure of Kesterson, who had been the team’s in-house designer.

Faced with the struggle of creating a good-looking PowerPoint update for their investors without design resources available, remaining co-founder Leneway proposed the idea for Haiku Deck. With Haiku Deck, the two set out to design an all-new app that makes it easy for non-designers to quickly create beautiful presentations. Inspired by best practices of presentation and storytelling gurus like Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds, and Guy Kawasaki, they built Haiku Deck around a few core principles: Focus on one idea at a time, use a powerful image to reinforce your idea, apply consistent formatting, and keep your charts and graphs simple.

Haiku Deck for iPad was launched as a free app amidst critical and customer acclaim in August 2012. The Wall Street journal hailed the app as, “a smart app that makes beautiful slide shows in no time” and Mashable called it, “Instagram for pitch decks.” It was featured as a “new and noteworthy’ app on Apple iTunes shortly after launch. The firm raised a $3M series A round led by Trilogy Ventures in April of 2013. When they announced their Series A round the company changed its name to Haiku Deck and announced that it had reached the milestone of 500,000 downloads.[iii]

In November 2013 the team brought Haiku Deck to the web as a free app that was named as one of Time Magazine’s top 50 web sites of 2014.

The company released Haiku Deck for iPhone in February 2014 and announced it had reached over 1 million downloads. In March of 2015, the company announced Haiku Deck Zuru, a patent-pending technology that uses artificial intelligence to transform structured content, like PowerPoint decks, into beautiful presentations. In July 2015 the company launched Haiku Deck Pro, a premium version of the app that includes Zuru and offers advanced features like presentation privacy, the ability to export decks to .pptx and .pdf format, YouTube video embedding, and more.

In October 2015, the company announced a new round of financing and that they had reached the milestone 3.6 million iTunes downloads and 2 million registered users.

1.1 Personal life

Tratt is married with three children. On December 16, 2016 Tratt was the victim of a carjacking in Seattle, Washington while waiting for one of his children to finish a tennis lesson at the University of Washington.[iv]

1.2 Notable Speaking Engagements

·        “Bullet control now,” Ignite Seattle, August 2012

·        Geekwire Podcast, August 2012

·         “Startup Storytelling for the win,” Geekwire Startup Day, October 2012

·        “Killer presentations to win clients and close deals,” Inman Connect, February 2013

·        Agent Caffeine Podcast, May 2013

·        “Storytelling for Startups,” Startup Grind, September 2013

·        “Going from Corporate to Startup,” Techstars, April 2015

·        “Creating Presentations that Inspire,” Time to Shine Podcast, April 2015

·        Platform Giant Podcast, August 2015

1.3 Awards

·       Top 100 Websites of 2013, PC Mag, January 2014

·       Teachers With Apps Certification, January 2014

·       Winner, Geekwire App of the Year, and Finalist, Geekwire Startup of the Year, May 2013

·       Community Poll Winner and Live Pitch Runner-up, MoDev Tablet Disruptathon, August 2013

·       Nominee, Bammy EdTech Award, August 2013

External Links

·        www.haikudeck.com

·         https://www.haikudeck.com/adam-tratt-business-presentation-u9YVMmOYj7

·        www.haikudeck.com/press

·        www.haikudeck.com/about

·        www.linkedin.com/in/adamtr

·

[i] Bruce Horovitz, "Cranium guys have their inner child on speed dial", n.d.

[ii] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/haiku-deck#/entity

[iii] Etherington, D. (2013, April/May). With 500K Downloads, Haiku Deck Raises $3M Series A For Its Unique, Mobile-First Presentation Creation App. Retrieved February 18, 2016, from http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/03/with-500k-downloads-haiku-deck-raises-3m-series-a-for-its-unique-mobile-first-presentation-creation-app/

[iv] Cook, John. "Seattle Startup CEO Victim of Terrifying Carjacking - GeekWire.". GeekWire, 07 Dec. 2015. Web. 18 Feb. 2016.