Meet Aproove CEO, Curt Black!

At Aproove Work Management, we’re kicking off the year with fresh leadership and bold ambitions! Stepping into the CEO role, Curt Black brings a wealth of experience, a deep understanding of marketing technology, and a clear vision for Aproove’s future.

In this exclusive interview, we sit down with Curt to learn more about his journey—his professional background, what drew him to Aproove, and the goals he has set for the company in the coming year. We also have his take on what he considers the biggest challenges facing today’s marketers, and how Aproove is positioned to help them work smarter. Plus, we’ll get a glimpse into what keeps him motivated on a day-to-day basis, and what his passions are outside of the company!

Hi Curt, can you tell us a bit about your background and what led you to join Aproove Work Management as CEO? 

I started my career at Google where I learned to think big, work hard, and do the small things well. I spent almost 9 years there leading sales, growth marketing, partnerships, and product teams across some of our fastest growing industries. There are two chapters at Google that I am still very proud of today.  

My first role at Google was focused on developing growth marketing plans with VC-backed technology startups just after a Series A or B round of funding. We would spend time with each company’s marketing department and CMO, understand their CAC / LTV goals, growth objectives, then develop a plan that led to sustainable growth. We’d execute against these plans and work closely with their marketing teams along the way. The core of our strategy was often Google Search and performance display combined with 1P and 3P data, but back in 2012 and 2013 video and programmatic advertising was emerging. We were on the experimental edge of pushing brands like Wealthfront, Sofi, and Nest to adopt growth marketing strategies across performance display and video that became the cornerstones of their “brandformance” approach.  

I then moved to Washington D.C. to join Google’s U.S. Elections team, focusing advertising and business strategy to Presidential and statewide campaigns in the United States. Our team worked with Presidential and Statewide campaigns to reshape how American voters are reached, shifting focus to digital video and programmatic targeting, and then to Connected TV and YouTube. We were lucky to work on the playbook for how small-dollar donations are raised online, increasingly through a mixture of First Party data augmented with Machine Learning. I spent four years here developing our business and was ultimately leading the team as a Head of Industry focused on growing our Ads business. And then Global Product Lead, focused on our product roadmap for the 2020 Presidential election.  

I was most recently Chief Revenue Officer at Aktify, a conversational AI platform that managed fully automated marketing conversations (SMS, web chat) with prospective customers. We could fully automate text-based conversations trained with the brand’s data to answer questions, qualify a lead, and then pass that lead to the most relevant human owner once data was collected. Our largest customers were in high-compliance industries like healthcare and financial services. 

 
Across all of these teams, I’ve been honored to work at the nexus of technological innovation and marketing process, often in industry sectors with a very high emphasis on compliance and brand safety. When I first met Xavier and Gary at Aproove, I immediately saw that Aproove had a great product, a solid team, and passionate customers. Many of the same traits that we’d often see in Google Ads and at Aproove. I’m excited for the opportunity to keep building a great product and transform how projects are built and approved.   

What is your vision for Aproove Work Management in the next 12-24 months?

I am focused on three things: our team, our customers, and our product. If we can support thoughtful growth across these three, we’ll be very successful.  

Firstly, I’ve been incredibly impressed with our team at Aproove. We hire great people and do a good job of training and empowering them. Customers who work with us will note our speed of development, and our speed of responding to technical questions with a high degree of helpful contextual accuracy. These are core values of Aproove that have led to our customers being advocates for our product. Firstly, we can’t lose sight of this.  

As we start to think about growing the team, I’m excited to onboard more great Aproove teammates in North America to support our growth and to help us tell our story to new customers and partners. 

I’m also focused on spending as much time as I can with our customers. Our product roadmap has always been developed in consultation with our most innovative customers. We have a culture of deep listening, understanding business problems, and then developing elegant solutions. I am thrilled that Xavier Dorvillers is stepping into the CTO role. He’s already working on a compelling product vision for the next few years and I’m excited to support him however I can.  

How do you see Aproove standing out in the competitive work management and online proofing space throughout 2025 (and beyond)?

Let’s start by looking at the state of marketing and project management. I believe that the market is asking for better solutions to streamlining full cycle project development. The data would say that 66% of Project Managers are too stressed. Teams have to ping between 6-10 tools on average to take a project from planning, work, to review and compliance. At the same time, marketing assets are proliferating and the compliance stakes are higher than ever. In industries with strict brand guidelines and compliance, teams are now spending between 40-70% of their time in the “last mile” of review, editing, sign-off, and compliance. This is where Aproove shines and our job is to tell that story.  

There are four important differentiators:   

• Efficient projects start with the finish line in mind. One of our biggest advantages is that our technology was originally built to find the most efficient route to edit, review, record compliance and secure approvals. By starting where others slow down, we help teams finish faster—without compromising quality. Aproove is built to accelerate Work in Progress, and our systems are then built with your organization’s approval chain in mind.  

• Aproove empowers the worker. Other Project Management and Review Tools help you plan, but then leave workers high and dry to navigate a disparate software tech stack (click click click). Workers are constantly context shifting, software costs are increasing, and demands on deadlines are tightening. Our platform centralizes 'work-in-progress' into a single, streamlined hub, eliminating the need to download or upload files, and to switch platforms to “do the work”. This saves your team time clicking between 6+ platforms on average, and you can track the efficiency and time savings. With a fully workflow-based approach, Aproove reduces clicks and steps for employees, agencies, and external partners—enhancing efficiency and collaboration across teams.  

• No file too big, no workflow too complex. We mean it! We can uniquely manage massive files, huge volumes of assets, and organizational workflows that would break other platforms. Our tech was thoughtfully built (in-house only) with these use cases in mind. 
  

• Our team is the best in the business. Our customers often come to Aproove with the most rigorous digital transformation challenges. When you are trusting a platform with organizational change, you need to know that you are supported by business and product experts. Our team is amazing and our clients have peace-of-mind knowing that they have robust experts if they ever need help.  

I’m excited to tell our story! And I know that for brands who value security, organizational compliance, and track project efficiency, Aproove is a winning combination.   

Are there any upcoming features, improvements, or innovations that users can look forward to?  

I already mentioned our unique philosophy to 'Work-in-Progress': giving workers the tools to complete their tasks in the Aproove interface. For the first part of this year we are focused on bringing more tools into Aproove. The most exciting is a fully native integration with Microsoft Office. This will allow organizations to use Aproove’s robust workflows and compliance review interface to collaborate on the editing, review, and approval of documents. This will all occur in our interface, which is more secure, faster, and will have documented compliance.   

What is your favourite Aproove feature?

Many of our customers may not know that Aproove is already deploying compelling use cases of different styles of machine learning and “AI”. One example is Aproove’s Change Detection, that is native to our review interface. Aproove uses computer vision to look at each version of the document and point the reviewer to the exact changes, down to the pixel level. It saves time and works beautifully in huge files or large documents.  

I’m also excited about the idea of Planning Competencies. Where Aproove can understand the skills of users throughout an organization and find the most efficient way to route a project. This was a feature introduced as part of our Planning Module and starts to build on our philosophy of finding the most efficient path to project completion.  

You have a strong background in leadership roles, including at Google and Aktify. How will your past experiences influence your leadership at Aproove?

Thanks! I learned my management style from four great former bosses at Google. I was very lucky to work for each. Google has a saying: Respect the User, Respect the Opportunity, Respect the Team. The best managers I’ve worked for have never forgotten these priorities, or the order of the priorities.  

• Respect the User: Great companies build first to solve a clear customer problem. Many companies start with this value, and lose sight of the User as they grow. Aproove has been laser-focused on our Users and I intend to keep this focus.  

• Respect the Opportunity: We have a unique product and business opportunity, and a responsibility, to help leading brands shepherd their digital transformation efforts. We also have a responsibility to ensure we are telling the Aproove story as clearly as possible, and to hopefully bring our solution to more businesses and partners to save time and money. 

• Respect the Team: Great companies are just collections of great people. Don’t forget that, and recruit and retain accordingly! 

I’ll certainly bring this philosophy and order of priorities to Aproove!  

From your perspective, what are the biggest challenges that marketing and creative teams face today, and how does Aproove help solve them? 

At Google, Aktify, and now Aproove I’ve always worked with leading marketing teams. Over the past 10 years complexity has exponentially increased. The number of marketing platforms, the amount and variety of content produced to service these platforms, and now the integration of AI-generated content to fuel these channels.  

The data would show that CMOs are really overwhelmed, and the organizational compliance and brand safety processes haven’t kept up with these demands. Data would show that while 93% of CMOs have compliance processes in place, 57% felt that their company wasn’t able to adhere to the standards set.  

Aproove answers this challenge in a very elegant way, helping automate these processes and doing so in a way that is streamlined, secure, documented, and measurable.  

What is a daily habit you love doing? 

Catch me outside! I live in Newport Beach, California, and love to get outdoors. I am an avid surfer and golfer. I try to paddle out surfing 2 to 3 times per week. I’m no Kelly Slater, but it’s always a great habit to relax, get in the water, stretch the arms, and occasionally see some dolphins. Oh, and catch a wave or two. 

Is there a quote or mantra you live your life by and resonate with? 

One that I think is a good lesson in leadership is from Susan Wojiciki of YouTube:  

“Rarely are opportunities presented to you in a perfect way. In a nice little box with a yellow bow on top. 'Here, open it, it's perfect. You'll love it.' Opportunities —the good ones—are messy, confusing and hard to recognize. They're risky. They challenge you.” — Susan Wojcicki 

A second that I think is a good reminder for life, and for work management:  

"Start with the end in mind." — Stephen Covey 

What helps you stay motivated on good and hard days? 

The people I work with! Aproove is primarily a remote team, but we have a great culture of holding ad hoc video huddles every afternoon. It’s a motivating point in the day to check in with everyone on the team, hear what everyone is focused on, and to tackle any problems in the business together.  

My wife is also amazing and keeps me motivated and supported. She’s a local Otolyrangologist and reminds me that our work “is not brain surgery”. Or at least “it’s not ear and sinus surgery,” which are her specialties. While this can be helpful to put things into perspective, I do sometimes have to remind her that managing enterprise organizational project workflows can be just as complex and sensitive! And just as warranting of experts! 😂  

What are you passionate about outside of work?  

I mentioned that I spent four years leading U.S. Elections at Google. While politics and government are no longer my full-time work, I remain involved in a volunteer capacity in our local government. I am active on two City government boards in Newport Beach. The Water Quality and Coastal Tidelands Committee oversees all budgeting, staff, and infrastructure projects tied to our region’s local harbor, beaches, and bay. The General Plan Advisory Committee oversees our City’s creation of a 20 year plan for zoning, housing, safety, and infrastructure.  

Thanks for chatting with us, Curt! We’re excited to see how Aproove grows under your leadership and how your strategies will help marketers overcome their biggest challenges. Here’s to an exciting 2025 - and beyond!

Read more Aproove news and insights here!