Duru Ahanotu, PhD
Founder and Sole Proprietor, Ahan Analytics, LLC

Dr. Ahanotu is a graduate of Stanford University with over twenty-five years of experience with analytic modeling, executing pricing strategies, developing and implementing enterprise software, and managing teams of brilliant data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists. His research in knowledge management and organizational learning created the foundation. Duru Ahanotu, PhD founded Ahan Analytics, LLC (Ahan is pronounced “Ah-hon”) first as an entity for blogging for fans and students of financial markets. He quickly expanded to encompass quick projects helping small organizations use data more effectively, including optimizing the scheduling of doctors at an OBGYN practice, improving the web site services of a small Bay Area city, and providing financial modeling for a solar panel venture.

Dr. Ahanotu’s interest in small organization extends into volunteer work. Dr. Ahanotu volunteers for a broad array of civic and educational activities and organizations. He currently works with the Decision Education Foundation helping young people make quality decisions. With the Parent Teacher’s Association of the local elementary school, he spent nearly 5 years organizing a monthly “Night Out” which included working with local restaurants to raise money for PTA programming. He currently works with the District African American Advisory as an advocate for Black students and parents in the school district. While working with Verizon Media, Dr. Ahanotu won corporate grants for educational and community charities. He is also experienced in leading events and programming for Black employee resource groups and served as the lead for the Sunnyvale, CA branch of Black Organizers Leaders and Doers (BOLD) at Verizon Media. Dr. Ahanotu served on a local rent stabilization taskforce and now serves on a citizen’s bond oversight committee.

An extensive corporate career informs Dr. Ahanotu’s approach to helping small organizations. At Dictionary.com, Dr. Ahanotu leads a small analytics team. This team is responsible for nearly all things data in the company from reporting, financial forecasting, A/B testing, data analysis, analytics support for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts, product analytics, analytics support for the ad yield team, web site performance monitoring, and data engineering.

At Yahoo, now Verizon Media (sold to Apollo Global Management), Dr. Ahanotu spent 8 ½ years in various analytics and managerial roles. He started as a program manager of KPIs and Analytics for the technology platform group supporting Yahoo’s social networking efforts. On this team, Dr. Ahanotu consolidated reporting and dashboarding functions which improved efficiency of the entire team. Dr. Ahanotu soon moved to a centralized analytics and data organization where he eventually took over management of a growing team of business and insights analysts, data scientists, and statisticians. He grew the team from 4 to 20 in 2 years and provided services for operational reporting of internal and external industry data, research projects, and experimentation. Dr. Ahanotu completed his career at Verizon Media as the Director of Data Science and Engineering for Marketing where he managed a small team focused on supporting Marketing’s analytics and data needs. He led efforts to support Mobile growth through Data Science.

Before working at Yahoo, Dr. Ahanotu was a Sales Consultant in the Advertiser and Publisher Solutions (APS) group within Microsoft Advertising. In this capacity, he provided product knowledge, functional expertise, and technical support to APS account executives who sold APS’s suite of media monetization products. He led product
demonstrations and increased the productivity of the sales team by training and certifying employees on the use and demonstration of the software. Dr. Ahanotu took on this role after Microsoft acquired his former employer Rapt, Inc.

Rapt provided software solutions for maximizing revenue and yield for online media publishers. With Rapt, Dr. Ahanotu last served as an Engagement Manager for a software implementation for a $100 million on-line publisher with a rapidly growing business. With his project team, Dr. Ahanotu created and coordinated novel approaches to inventory forecasting, structuring of product hierarchies, and ETL across software systems for order management, advertising delivery, and Rapt’s software. He also generated a step-by-step methodology for interpreting and using the results of price optimization. As a Solutions Architect, Dr. Ahanotu served as the lead Solutions Consultant on client engagements and provided technical assistance and guidance to Solutions Consultants on other projects. Dr. Ahanotu designed and implemented price optimization solutions, demonstrating expertise in mathematical modeling, pricing, data analysis, SQL, and relational data models. He led discussions with customers and internal teams to improve implementation processes and product design. The efforts of Dr. Ahanotu earned him the distinction as a co-patent contributor: “Method and System for Producing Optimized Prices for Products for Sale.” While at Rapt, Dr. Ahanotu also presented a white paper on the pricing of New Product Introductions at the 2006 INFORMS Annual Meeting. The Professional Pricing Society published this paper in The Journal of Professional Pricing Vol. 16, No.1, First Quarter 2007 as “Pricing New Products: Turning Portfolio Uncertainty Into Profits.”

Prior to Rapt, Dr. Ahanotu was a consultant with Integral, Inc, a small strategic management consulting firm. During his three-year tenure, he consulted on product development and technology strategy focused on high tech and pharmaceutical companies. Prior to Integral, he developed mathematical programming algorithms for
managing and optimizing “Y2K” projects as an independent contractor. Dr. Ahanotu started his professional career while pursuing his Ph.D. As a Business Solutions Project Manager and Consultant for Expert Edge, Inc., he implemented expert systems for diagnosing and troubleshooting automotive and semiconductor manufacturing
equipment.

Dr. Ahanotu earned a Master’s and Ph.D. in Engineering-Economic Systems (now called Management Science and Engineering) in 1999, a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, and Honors in Values, Technology, Science, and Society in 1991 – all at Stanford University.