Rajiv Pant is a well-respected product, design, and engineering executive and entrepreneur. Rajiv combines his extensive expertise in technology, journalism and digital media with a passion for human connections and communities.
Career Highlights
Rajiv is Founding CTO at ScalePost.ai & Beyond Labels.
Rajiv is CEO & CTO at Power Zone Pack, where he leads the company’s strategic direction, business operations, and technology.
Previously, Rajiv served as Chief Product & Technology Officer at Hearst Magazines, Hearst Autos, and CDS Global, Inc, where he led product, design, engineering, and technology operations. Before Hearst, he was Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Company.
He served as Chief Product & Technology Officer of The Wall Street Journal, responsible for Product, Design, and Engineering where he reported jointly to the WSJ editor-in-chief and to Dow Jones corporate. He was then promoted to Deputy CTO of News Corp, parent company of WSJ and several other global brands.
Earlier, as Chief Technology Officer of The New York Times, Rajiv led the successful development and delivery of dozens of acclaimed mobile and web products over four years. He reported jointly to the business and to the editor-in-chief of The New York Times. Rajiv was honored by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader in 2014.
Prior to his move to The NY Times, Rajiv was Vice President of Digital Technology at Conde Nast for four years. He headed up technology for Conde Nast’s brands including Reddit.
Before Conde Nast, Rajiv was Chief Technology Officer at COXnet (now Cox Media Group), a division of Cox, one of the nation’s leading media and communications companies. It was during this tenure, that Rajiv received the Newspaper Association of America’s 20 Under 40 Award.
This followed a stint of nearly a decade at Knight Ridder, then the nation’s second-largest newspaper publisher. As Vice President of Technology at Knight Ridder Digital in San Jose, Rajiv led the development and implementation of the company’s innovative Web site products. He also worked closely with newsroom colleagues at The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News.
Rajiv twice received the prestigious Knight Ridder Excellence Award for Technology Innovation. Among the products developed by Rajiv and his team is Cofax, a leading open-source content management system used by newspapers and other companies around the world. Xmultra, a systems integration product developed by his team for feeds transfer and transformation with multiple newspaper systems, won the Newspaper Association of America’s New Media Award.
Rajiv’s leadership qualities were also recognized when two development teams under his direction received two separate Newspaper Association of America 2004 Best Practice Awards in New Media; the first for the development of web and multi-platform publishing tools, and a second for a software upgrade system for high traffic web sites.
Rajiv has experience building and supervising small teams to 500+ employees. He is admired for his win/win collaborative style by his peers. He strives to live every day by his life’s motto: “Victory is winning people over, not defeating others.”
Artificial Intelligence
Rajiv has been working on Artificial Intelligence related to news media, particularly Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Generation (NLG), and training machine learning models for news content since the early days of his career. Rajiv has been involved in leveraging Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to combat fake news, enhancing the integrity of media content in an era of increasing misinformation.
He was an early investor in and senior advisor to the AI search company you.com since its founding in August 2020 through December 2023. Rajiv is the founding technology advisor to ScalePost.AI, a platform that elevates collaboration between media companies and AI developers, unlocking new revenue opportunities and enhancing content strategies for technological advancement.
Rajiv is the primary developer of the open-source project Ragbot.AI, a personalized AI assistant and brain augmentation product that demonstrates advanced capabilities in language understanding, knowledge retrieval, and task completion.
Personal Life
He volunteers with the charity New York Cares, where he served in-person during the pandemic when help was needed most. Rajiv is a fitness enthusiast who was featured in a Men’s Health article about his commitment to working out for one hour daily for 1,000+ consecutive days.
Most important to him, Rajiv is a devoted dad to his son Fitz Raj. They enjoy doing math, Python programming, and playing sports and board games together. A lifelong learner, Rajiv has participated in executive education programs at MIT, Stanford University, Harvard University’s Kennedy School, and Yale University. For more information, visit Rajiv’s personal Web site at rajiv.com.