Vatsal Bhardwaj
Vatsal Bhardwaj is Chief Product Officer at Skillz, the leading mobile games platform bringing fair and fun competition to players worldwide. In his role, Vatsal leads the product and technology teams and is responsible for driving the creation of new services from concept, development and go-to market. He is an experienced gaming executive who brings deep game development and global launch expertise to top mobile gaming platforms, accelerating product momentum and supporting key growth initiatives. Prior to joining Skillz, he most recently served as the General Manager and Director of Game Tech for Amazon Web Services. While with AWS, he launched one of the largest open-source initiatives, Open 3D engine, Amazon GameSparks, grew Amazon Gamelift and initiated several new initiatives in gaming. Additionally, Vatsal is an angel investor to over 20 investments in gaming, crypto and blockchain, and SaaS.
Vatsal Bhardwaj Professional Experience / Academic History
Professional Experience
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General Manager and Director, AWS
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Head of Product, Various Groups
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Product Lead, Various Teams
Academic History
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Master of Business Administration
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Master's Degree, Electrical & Computer Engineering
SKILLZ
Vatsal reports directly to Paradise while leading the global team to become the world's top competitive entertainment brand.
He and his team will build and operationalize Skillz's product roadmap to enable developers to build successful businesses.
He helps scale the teams, operational practices and systems as Skillz experiences continued strong growth.
Vatsal and his team developed new services to transform how large-scale multiplayer games are developed, operated, scaled and distributed.
He was involved in the Open 3D Engine initiative, Gamelift, GameSparks, and multiple new services to operate massive scale games and simulations.
He managed projects and teams across engineering, product management, game design, production, art, UI/UX, and analytics.
He led Facebook’s India growth teams, and launched and scaled the Oculus App store and developer services.
EARLY CAREER
Prior to Facebook, he was General Manager and Head of Studios at Storm8, and also served in related roles at Match.com and Zynga.
He spent the early part of his career doing several engineering and product roles at Microsoft, building operating systems and services.
He was also a Board of Director for Bluetooth SIG and Artificial Intelligence Developer for Sun Microsystems.
MEDIA
Vatsal has appeared as a guest on Real Vision.