pocket.watch Taps AT&T Alum as first COO & CFO

Kids’ and family entertainment company pocket.watch has hired former AT&T executive Xavier Kochhar as its first-ever chief operating officer and chief financial officer.

As pocket.watch’s COO and CFO, Kochhar will oversee the company’s major business units, including direct-to-consumer, content sales and distribution, and creator partnerships, and will lead the company’s corporate development, strategy and finance divisions.

Other major business units Kochhar will oversee include advertising, consumer products and gaming.

Prior to joining pocket.watch, Kochhar was a senior executive with the AT&T family of companies as the head of strategy and business development of HBO Max. Most recently, he worked within the corporate strategy and development group of its parent company, AT&T. Before his time at AT&T, Kochhar founded and served as the CEO of the Video Genome Project (VGP), where he and his team built the world’s largest database of video content metadata. He has also been managing director of Medlink and a corporate executive at The Walt Disney Company and L.E.K. Consulting.

Chris M. Williams, founder and CEO of pocket.watch, said: “Xavier’s vast experience in corporate strategy and development, operations and finance in companies ranging from startups to Fortune 100s is precisely what pocket.watch needs as we consider all the opportunities in our next phase of growth. I am thrilled he has agreed to join pocket.watch and confident his extremely rare combination of entrepreneurial savvy and corporate intelligence will take the company to the next level.”

Kochhar added: “These last few years, we have seen the major vertically integrated media companies take back much of their own content in order to stand up and grow their direct-to-consumer offerings. This has created a massive opportunity for those independent content platforms, who have proven they can deliver young audiences who are drawn to creator-based content, to fill this void. pocket.watch is one of only a few creator-economy companies in kids’ and family—a category that has shown to not only drive first-time streams but also greatly reduce churn—to have proven this model. And perhaps the only one whose tremendous growth is largely ahead of it. I feel privileged to be working with the pocket.watch team to help them realize this growth.”