Pema joins as Chief Innovation and Technology Officer after more than six years at Amazon, where she launched AI applications for enterprise customers on AWS.
Steven.com has hired Ada Pema as Chief Innovation and Technology Officer. She reports directly to founder Steven Bartlett, sits in the C-suite, and will build the company’s technology business from the ground up. Before Amazon she was Principal Product Manager Tech for Amazon’s Global Payments and Fraud organisation, where she built the global payments infrastructure that lets Amazon’s customers pay in any country, in any payment method, securely. And before that she ran senior technical product management for Amazon Payments Europe, where she launched Strong Customer Authentication across 40+ businesses, 27 countries and more than 4,000 banks, as part of the European regulation that changed how every online payment on the continent is verified.
Before Amazon, she led product at Wayfair, hiring and running teams of product managers, designers, analysts and engineers across product lines responsible for 500+ suppliers and $6 billion in revenue. She started her career at McMaster-Carr, where over seven years she worked her way up from international supply chain operations to rolling out the company’s first global digital asset management system.
She is a self-taught technologist who picks up whatever the problem requires, from COBOL and VB early in her career to retrieval-augmented generation and large language model customisation today. She studied at Harvard and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Steven.com is already one of the most influential creator media companies in the world and Ada’s focused on building the technology infrastructure that the industry’s most high-potential creators need to launch, scale and sustain their businesses.
he company is moving from a media business that uses technology to a company with technology at the very heart of everything it does: a custom AI trained on the company’s own knowledge and history, proprietary models of what its audience watches, buys and engages with, consumer technology products, internal tools turned into products for other businesses, shared technology infrastructure across its portfolio of investments, and a longer-term bet on making human connection measurable.
Pema’s job is to lead all of it. She also sits across all technology-related M&A, technical due diligence and investment decisions at the holding-company level.
Pema is building a senior team organised into three verticals, each led by a Director reporting to her: B2B, B2C, and AI and Data. She owns every hiring decision for the technology arm and will be recruiting senior engineers over the next 12 months.