Paul Sas, Founder
I’m the founder of Motivation Engineers. As a Stanford-trained behavioral economist my expertise is applying psychology to software development. I’ve helped teams integrate behavioral economics into products at many startups as well as companies like Intuit, Asana, Facebook, and consumer products such as Mint & TurboTax. I’ve led dozens of workshops in collaboration with Dan Ariely. My work enables startups to translate psychology into opportunities for significant product enhancements.
Motivation Engineers' clients have boosted revenue, improved product experiences, and significantly lifted customer engagement. One of our startup clients raised 27 million dollars after integrating behavioral insights into their prototype pitch.
I’ve successfully up-leveled diverse groups of designers, developers, product managers and marketing / growth teams. Repeatedly, I’ve seen the power teams can exploit when they leverage practical applications from behavioral economics. Exacting clarity and painstaking specificity are key to translating psychology into algorithms. In my workshops, I take product teams from the inspiration of a design sprint all the way through to launched product experiences. I know how to teach teams how to design and deliver behaviorally inspired products.
My PhD research identified the Delmore Effect, demonstrating our resistance to setting goals for emotionally important projects. I’ve studied with one of the creators of Behavioral Economics, Amos Tversky. I’ve taught courses at Stanford & California College of Arts on emotional design, conversational agents, human decision-making, game theory, and the psychology of motivation and goals. I interned at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) User Interface Research Group, was an NSF Summer Fellow at Santa Fe Institute, and a research intern at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in the cognitive science group. I programmed BayCHI's monthly event at Xerox PARC from Web 2.0 through iPhone X.