Rodney (Khayri) Cobb
Founder/CEO at WeGotGame Inc.
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Actions
Khayri has over a decade of engineering experience, from co-founding a Knight Foundation award winning security startup to leading engineering at Al Jazeera America, The Atlantic, and Axios. He has spent his career building products that reach millions. Now he's building the digital layer that recreational sports has always been missing.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Scaling Leaders, Not Just Systems: DevOps as a Culture Methodology
You can autoscale infrastructure. You can't autoscale judgment.
Most engineering processes aren't processes — they're habits. If only one person can do it, it's a dependency. If you can't test it, you can't improve it. I took DevOps principles — repeatability, testability, transparency — and applied them to the human side of scaling: hiring, onboarding, incident response, architecture decisions.
At Axios, we rebuilt the CMS during an election cycle. At Al Jazeera, we scaled video infrastructure under breaking-news pressure. At The Atlantic, we modernized legacy systems while keeping the lights on. None of that succeeded because of tools. It succeeded because we made decisions visible, failures learnable, and knowledge transferable.
This talk walks through real architecture decisions, postmortems, and hiring processes from those three newsrooms. I'll show you the frameworks that worked when mistakes were public and expensive. Live examples on screen — ADRs, incident timelines, interview rubrics.
You'll leave able to identify single points of failure in people (not just systems), test your own processes the way you test code, and build transparency into decision-making so teams scale judgment, not just infrastructure.
Building Sports Infrastructure in the Age of AI: Lessons from WeGotGame
150 million Americans play unorganized sports. Zero data infrastructure exists for them.
BIBI-5 is an agentic AI companion that learns which courts you love, which NBA players shape your style, what brands define your off-court identity — then curates a bespoke experience around public basketball. Not a scheduling tool. A companion that knows you. The technical challenge: personalization when users don't exist in any database yet.
Our content pipeline ingests from five sources — Google News RSS, NewsData.io, YouTube, podcasts, direct feeds — 3,143 items categorized daily for under $4/day. That feeds BIBI-5's understanding of basketball culture: sneaker drops, player fashion, music, social moments. The moat is bidirectional — athletes influence rec players (LeBron's style shapes what people wear to the park), and rec players predict which athletes trend nationally. No one else captures this signal.
I'll walk through the live architecture — multi-source ingestion design, cold-start personalization strategy, and why cultural data (fashion, music, court preferences) beats game stats for engagement. Includes a live demo of the content pipeline processing articles in real time. Real costs, real tradeoffs, real code on screen.
You'll walk away able to build personalization without existing user profiles, design near-zero-cost content pipelines at scale, and identify bidirectional data moats in consumer products.
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top