Rethinking retail is our mission.

What we stand for.

All needs are not created equal. At Stockwell, we’ve set out to rethink retail with a simple goal in mind—to help people out by adapting to their needs. We believe that each community where people work, live, and play, needs evolve and differ. Because you need more than just Gatorade™ at the gym and Cheetos® at work.

That’s why we place stores right where you are and stock ‘em up with goodies that reflect and enhance the experience of being in your space. We’ve built our Stockwells with sleek design and tech in mind, and gave them the smarts to figure out what each community really needs by learning from customer behavior. All in a seamless, frictionless, wallet-less shopping experience.

We were born in Oakland, California, in 2016 and are expanding as we speak. For the time being, we operate out of offices in Hayward, CA; Houston, TX; Chicago, IL; and Los Angeles, CA.

Founders

Ashwath Rajan

Co-Founder, President, and CTO

Ashwath has a lifelong passion to improve the human condition and decision-making with technology. Easy, right? As a teenager, he conducted research synthesizing nanoparticles to help doctors more rapidly detect cancer and developed an energy management system to reduce electricity waste in New York skyscrapers. After working as a trader at a $300m quantitative hedge fund—where he developed frameworks to test and execute investment decisions—he joined Google. There, he worked to improve Google Travel and Google Maps and eventually met Paul, paving the road for what would eventually become Stockwell. Ash has a B.S. in Biomedical & Electrical Engineering from USC and an M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University, with a focus on Machine Learning. Off the clock, he plays alto saxophone and loves jazz music.

Paul McDonald

Co-Founder and CEO

Paul is an avid fan of technology, organizational dynamics and food (especially of the snacking variety.). It's no wonder his path eventually led him to become an entrepreneur, creating a retail technology company focused on combining retail with cutting-edge technology (with an impressive snack portfolio.) Prior to Stockwell, Paul spent 12 years at Google while founding a CPG company on the side. He led a variety of teams across consumer, commerce, advertising and cloud computing products. He led the Gmail product team, ran the autonomous startup for Google Consumer Surveys and was part of the team that launched Google Checkout, Google App Engine and several products for Google Adwords. He is passionate about design, UX and building connected, empowered teams for growth. Outside of work he is a father of 3, basketball lover and die-hard Detroit Lions fan.