Tony Lynn with Red Tree Labs and Kurt Uhlir with Sideqik

Posted on April 24, 2014April 25, 2014

Multifaceted, resourceful technology professional with a distinguished career building world class technology environments and teams. Experience in building teams from the ground up in start-ups to re-factoring well established teams in public companies. Energetic and resourceful leader with the ability to build consensus across all levels of the organization. Built his first software program at age 12 and has been part of both public and private companies. Loves the energy that comes with startups and is looking to constantly capture lightning in a bottle!

Kurt Uhlir / Sideqik

Kurt has a history of building disruptive technology and has led teams in social, location and mobile across six continents. He has helped marketing teams and hundreds of consumer brands with their marketing mix and digital marketing strategies.

Kurt is currently CEO and cofounder of Sideqik, an Atlanta-based startup. Sideqik focuses on helping digital marketers with their marketing partnerships and verifying the ROI of each cross-promotion. Website Magazine and Forbes have both highlighted Sideqik’s unique approach to helping digital marketers reach their goals, and Sideqik was chosen to kick off Venture Atlanta in 2013.

Prior to Sideqik, he was on the front lines at NAVTEQ, helping define the spatial and location-based industries. During his tenure leading competitive strategy and business affairs, Navteq completed an $880M IPO and eventual $8.1 billion sale to Nokia. He also is the lead inventor on fundamental patents covering check‐in services and mobile advertising. Three years after the sale, Kurt joined Vitrue and served as Director of Corporate Development, leading acquisition, partnerships, and growth strategy through their sale to Oracle.

Kurt currently serves as a mentor with Georgia Tech’s Flashpoint “startup studio” and the Atlanta Ventures Accelerator (AVA). He attended Vanderbilt University, where he ran Cross Country and track, and later received a Master’s in financial engineering from the University of Alabama.

Justin Sacks with StartupPoint and Timothy C. Gaines with Mitel

Posted on April 10, 2014

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Justin Sacks / StartupPoint

StartupPoint’s founder, Justin Sacks, has been a passionate advocate for local entrepreneurship and asset based community development for more than a decade. He has consulted to a range of organizations, from large institutions like the US Agency for International Development to myriad grassroots community groups, in an ongoing mission to support communities to grow their economy based on the resources they already possess. Justin is a serial entrepreneur, patent-holding inventor, and internationally published author on sustainable local economic development. For this work, Justin was named one of the UK’s top 100 social entrepreneurs under 35 in 2008. Justin holds a B.A. in Architecture magna cum laude from Yale University and a M.Sc. in Economic History with merit from the London School of Economics. And, Justin has always loved maps.

Timothy C. Gaines / Mitel

Vice President of Channel Sales, US

With more than 20 years of sales and general management experience in the telecommunications industry Tim is a VoIP and UC pioneer. A proven leader in building high-powered sales teams with a strong track record of developing successful channel organizations with premier partners.

Prior to Mitel Mr. Gaines spent 6 years at ShoreTel where he served as VP of Sales for North America. Other assignments include leadership positions as Senior Vice President of Sales at Covad (now MegaPath), a leading provider of Broadband and VoIP solutions for commercial and government business segments, and as WW VP of Sales at StarVox.

Previously, Mr. Gaines also served as Regional Director and General Manager for a U.S. subsidiary of Fujitsu, and as Regional Director at PictureTel where he was one of the architects of a high-growth distribution strategy that led PictureTel to be recognized by Fortune magazine as one of the 100 fastest growing companies in the U.S. (1992 to 1996).

Mr. Gaines received a BS in Business Administration from California State University, Sacramento.

Special Edition: Georgia CIO Leadership Association

Posted on April 3, 2014

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Lisa LaRoque/Georgia CIO Leadership Association

First part of career spent in marketing for LOB application software companies; Moved into business development for technology service providers over the last nine years, most recently having worked for Intellinet, a management consulting and technology solutions firm.

Jay Ferro/American Cancer Society

Jay is currently Chief Information Officer for the American Cancer Society (ACS), a nationwide, community-based voluntary health organization dedicated to eliminating cancer as a major health problem. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, the American Cancer Society has more than 900 local offices nationwide and a presence in more than 5,100 communities. Jay is responsible for the people, strategy and operations of the Global Information Technology organization.

Prior to joining ACS in 2012, Jay served as Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for AdCare Health Systems, a rapidly growing and recognized innovator in health care facility management. Jay spent the previous 7 years at AIG (American International Group), most recently as VP and CIO for AIG Aerospace, a leading global aerospace insurer. At AIG, Jay implemented numerous improvements that have delivered substantial value to the organization while managing significant organizational change in a turbulent market environment. In addition to his role as AVP of Information Technology with AIG Personal Lines, Jay was selected as CFO for Operations and Systems in 2006 and led multiple global IT Finance and Governance Standards initiatives that resulted in millions of dollars in savings for the organization.

Jay continues to be a thought leader in the Information Technology arena and is a frequent guest speaker and panelist, both in Atlanta and Nationwide. In recognition of his accomplishments, Jay was selected as Georgia CIO of the Year in 2011, and is currently serving as Chair for the Georgia CIO Leadership Association.

His commitment and dedication to community involvement is evidenced by the time and energy he contributes. In 2007, he founded the non-profit group, Priscilla’s Promise, in honor of his late wife, which raises funds for cervical cancer education and research, and currently serves as its Executive Director. In 2011 he was elected to the Board of Directors for TechBridge, an Atlanta-based nonprofit organization which helps other nonprofits use technology to improve their capability to serve the community, and in 2013 was named Board Chair.

Jay earned both his Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and his Masters of Business Administration from The University of Georgia. Jay continues to be involved with his alma mater, both as a mentor for young alumni and as a member of the Alumni Board of Directors for the Terry College of Business.

Jay lives in the Metro Atlanta Area with his 3 sons: Trey, Connor and Alex.

Kris Maher with One Ring Networks, Lee Farabaugh with PointClear Solutions, and Sarah Lodato with The Iron Yard

Posted on March 27, 2014

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Kris Maher/One Ring Networks

With over a decade of industry experience, Kris Maher is the trailblazer behind One Ring Networks and its responsive, customer-focused culture. Maher heads the field and channel sales company-wide and leads sales teams for all of One Ring Networks fiber and fixed wireless customers in Atlanta, Dallas and Fort Worth. He is a member of the Atlanta Promise Neighborhood Initiative and loves spending his time outside of the office with his family and dog, Ivy. When Kris isn’t helping businesses stay connected, he can be found enjoying the great outdoors skiing, golfing, and searching for the next great golfer to help bring home the win at the annual customer golf tournament.

Kris holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Management and Marketing from Canisius College in Buffalo, NY.

Lee Farabaugh/PointClear Solutions

Lee Farabaugh is a senior user experience research and design expert, having worked in user experience in healthcare for the past 8 years. She has worked on projects in a variety of healthcare domains, from public health and life sciences to consumer- and provider-facing healthcare applications. As Chief Experience Office at PointClear Solutions, she currently leads the User Experience, Clinical Insight, Business Analysis, and Project Management teams.

Before becoming a founding partner of PointClear in 2006, she was a usability engineer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, GA. Lee is a member of the adjunct faculty of University of Alabama’s School of Health Professions, teaching Masters level students in the Health Informatics program about user experience in healthcare information technology. She also serves on the HIMSS EHR Usability Task Force.

Lee holds a Master of Health Informatics from University of Alabama at Birmingham, a Master of Human-Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech, and a Bachelor of Arts from Wake Forest University.

Sarah Lodato/The Iron Yard

The Iron Yard exists to create exceptional value for people and their ideas through code education, startup accelerators and coworking spaces.

Through our broad, deep and growing network of teachers, programmers, designers, entrepreneurs, investors, employers and coworking spaces, we have developed a thriving community where serendipity happens en masse.

We are people-centric.

We put our students, teams, investors and supporters first in all of our decision making. Our success is entirely dependent on their success.

Our challenge is immense.

The world has huge problems that need to be solved, many of which technology is perfectly suited to address. Companies around the globe are answering this call, but anyone with boots on the ground can feel the acute shortage of talent needed to rise to the occasion. That gap is widening right now, and over the next decade the shortfall will affect industries, economies, businesses and individuals as they fight to add value in a digital world.

The Iron Yard is a solution at that juncture of supply, demand, business and a broken education system.

We are committed to training the highest-quality developers and startups in the world, both in skill and in character. Our mission is to find people who want to pursue the craft and life-long adventure of technology, teach them the tools of the trade, and then release them into the world with the drive and capability to make a difference. We believe that passionate, talented people who love what they do will create great families, jobs, companies and solutions to the world’s problems.

Brad Anderson with MapR Technologies, Chad Adam and Ben Walle with Hopintop

Posted on March 20, 2014

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Brad Anderson / MapR Technologies

Brad Anderson is a Solutions Architect with MapR Technologies. Brad has been wrangling data for 20 years, first with data warehouses, and more recently building and using non-relational data systems in the big data space. Previously, he worked on a large-scale video-on- demand platform in Erlang, helped Cloudant build its hosted NoSQL offering based on CouchDB (IBM just acquired Cloudant), and organized the NoSQL East 2009 conference in Atlanta. He has recently worked with Cascading, Storm, Titan, & Solr, and has contributed code to CouchDB & HBase open-source projects. Brad has founded or co-founded four technology companies, including Verdeeco, a smart energy grid company in Atlanta, as well as Heartbyte, a realtime audience participation platform.

Chad Adam and Ben Walle / HopInTop

HopInTop is the go to Atlanta based marketing firm specializing in Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing, Web Design, Pay Per Click Adwords, Public Relations, Content Marketing and Social Media, driving revenue to local businesses. With many clients worldwide, HopInTop strives to increase business revenue by matching actionable and attractive Websites with buying traffic through Internet promotion. Branding is a top priority with HopInTop, dedicating valuable time to communicate the goals and objectives, while understanding companies bottom line. HopInTop is performance you can count on.

Blake Patton with Tech Square Ventures, Mark Seeley with Intellinet and Nancy Treaster with Verint

Posted on March 13, 2014

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Blake Patton/Tech Square Ventures

Blake is a technology entrepreneur and investor with 20 years of experience in startup, venture backed, and publicly traded internet, software, payments, and financial services companies.

Prior to founding Tech Square Ventures, Blake was General Manager of theAdvanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) at Georgia Tech – recently named by Forbes as one of the “Top 12 Incubators Changing the World”. Before ATDC, he served as President & COO of Interactive Advisory Software; CEO of iKobo; and EVP of iXL, an e-business consulting firm that he joined through the acquisition of Swan Media and was part of the executive team that grew the company from startup to over $300 million in annualized revenue and an IPO. Blake also founded, and later successfully sold, Siteman – one of the first application service provider (ASP) offerings in the online content management space. He started his career as an Associate at SEI Corporation.

Blake currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Atlanta CEO Council and Venture Atlanta and is aGeorgia Research Alliance (GRA) Industry Fellow. He earned a Bachelor of Industrial and Systems Engineering degree from Georgia Tech, where he was Captain of the Swim Team. He was inducted into the Georgia Tech College of Engineering’s Council of Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni and previously served on the Georgia Tech Advisory Board.

Mark Seeley/Intellinet

Mark Seeley has over 20 years of experience as a strategic business executive and entrepreneur. Having founded and co-founded five companies across varying industries – including software, ecommerce, logistics, and real estate – Mr. Seeley’s passion is helping companies succeed by maximizing the business value of IT. As president and senior partner of Intellinet, he is responsible for establishing the company’s vision, strategy and objectives, as well as serving as an executive strategist for creating innovative client solutions.

Since joining Intellinet in 1996, Mr. Seeley has served in a variety of strategic business development and leadership roles. Most recently, his responsibilities included developing Intellinet’s go-to-market strategy and operational readiness plan, as well as direct management of strategic client accounts ranging from Fortune 500 companies to entrepreneurial start-ups. Prior to joining Intellinet, Mr. Seeley served as a senior management and process consultant at Andersen Consulting where he specialized in business process optimization and data integration solutions.

Mr. Seeley earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a member of The Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), The MIT Enterprise Forum, Technology Executive Roundtable (TER), and High Tech Ministries. He resides in Mableton, GA with his wife and three children.

Nancy Treaster/Verint

Nancy Treaster serves as a Senior Vice President and General Manager of Strategic Operations for Verint® Enterprise Intelligence Solutions™, part of Verint Systems Inc. Verint is a leading global provider of Actionable Intelligence® solutions that include award-winning Customer Engagement Optimization software and services. In this capacity, she drives global strategies and the corresponding execution of those strategies across the business line, including go-to-market and M&A strategies, strategic alliances and marketing.

With 30 years of experience in the high-tech software industry, Treaster has held an array of leadership positions, including 10 years with Witness Systems and 13 years with Dun & Bradstreet Software. As part of Witness Systems’ senior management team, she served as senior vice president of global marketing, including product management, working alongside the worldwide sales, support and engineering organizations. At Dun & Bradstreet Software, she directed product management and product marketing, and held leadership roles across such areas as training, consulting, product management, sales and marketing.

Treaster holds a Bachelor of Science in management science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

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Matthew Bivens – The Digital Marketing Guy, Paul Lizon with TixSameDay and Corregan Brown with ProjectLocker

Posted on March 6, 2014

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Matthew Bivens/The Digital Marketing Guy

Matthew Bivens was born in San Diego and raised in Roswell. He attended the University of Florida for undergraduate (BA in Psychology) and graduate school (MS in Entrepreneurship). Matthew has worked in startup companies and marketing firms.

Paul Lizon/TixSameDay

With secondary ticket marketplace solutions shutting down 8-10 hours prior to the game or event, hopeful attendees or ticket holders needing to buy or sell their tickets are out of luck. Not any more. TixSameDay is an easy to use mobile app that helps last minute ticket buyers and ticket sellers connect and transact. On the day of or even after the event has begun, the TixSameDay app will help millions of consumers buy and sell last minute event tickets by leveraging geo-location, in-app messaging and in-app payments. No more wandering around aimlessly hoping to find tickets to buy or people to buy your tickets!

Corregan Brown/ProjectLocker

Corregan has a passion for applying software and technology to solving real-world problems. He has spent the past twelve years working with customers in the United States and Internationally, having worked as a consultant, technical lead, and project manager for Cambridge Technology Partners, pcOrder (a division of Trilogy), and Blue Martini Software. After years of seeing the effects of project infrastructure on project schedules and delivery quality, he co-founded ProjectLocker, a suite of Web-based services to make it easier to manage software development projects in the cloud. Corregan has a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree from Princeton University.

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Louie Bernstein with Izenda and Mike Slawson with Lumense

Posted on February 27, 2014February 28, 2014

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Louie Bernstein/Izenda

Louie has been successfully selling B2B products and services for over two decades. His first job was at the age of 10, working at a hot dog stand in Skokie, Illinois. It’s where he first learned the value of, “you want fries with that?”

Louie is the Chief Sales Officer (CSO) at Izenda. Last year his team increased sales contract value 104%, compared to 2012. Since joining Izenda sales have grown an average of 52% per year, over the last three years.

Louie is the recipient of the Top 25 Most Influential Inside Sales Professional award for 2013. Over 1,000 nominations were received and I was among the 25 selected. This is a peer-nominated award.

Louie has won sales awards with every company he has been associated with, or has run. In 2002 his company, MindIQ, was included in the INC. 500 list for one of the fastest growing private companies in America, over a five year period.

Louie is the author of “How to be a Professional Salesperson” a comprehensive and daily sales training course that is sold around the world. The lessons in this course pull from a career of real-world selling experiences.

Mike Slawson/Lumense

Mike Slawson is a co-founder and the Chief Executive Officer of Atlanta-based Lumense, a Georgia Tech spinoff commercializing real-time chemical and biological sensor technology. At Lumense Mike oversees all aspects of the company’s development, including business strategy and fundraising. Prior to Lumense, Mike was the founding CEO of Qualtré, Inc., another Georgia Tech spinoff commercializing MEMS inertial sensors. While at Qualtré, Mike was instrumental in licensing the company’s intellectual property from Georgia Tech, developing the business model and strategy, establishing relationships with key customers, partners and suppliers, hiring team members, and raising $5 million in equity capital and $2 million in debt and grant capital from top-tier investors. Mike has served as Advisory Board Chairman at Qualtré since relocating the company to Boston in late 2009.

From 1998 until 2011 Mike was also a general partner at Alliance Technology Ventures, a $250 million Atlanta-based venture capital firm focused on developing early-stage companies in information technology and life sciences. For several years, Mike was responsible for the firm’s information technology investment strategy. Mike either managed or assisted other partners with the management of the firm’s successful investments in several companies, including SecureWorks, Novera, Telaxis, SyChip, Digital Furnace, Mindlever, and OmniGuide. Prior to joining ATV, Mike was a Kauffman Fellow at Chicago-based ARCH Venture Partners.

Mike has a bachelor’s degree (magna cum laude) in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from Vanderbilt University, a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University, and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Mike also held engineering and engineering management positions with Hewlett-Packard, Siemens, and Alcatel, and holds three US patents. Mike lives in Atlanta with his wife and three children and, in his spare time, enjoys creative writing, coaching youth sports, and hiking.

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Jim Berryhill with DecisionLink and Sidd Ahmed with VDart

Posted on February 20, 2014

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Jim Berryhill/DecisionLink

Jim Berryhill is CEO with DecisionLink. Jim is a highly respected executive with substantial experience in enterprise sales and management at CA, Siebel and Mercury/HP Software. His understanding of value selling was key in transforming these companies from product to solution selling with dramatic increases in revenue, ASP, and other key metrics. His vision for pervasive customer alignment through automation is the driving force of DecisionLink, and an industry game-changer.

Sidd Ahmed/VDart Inc.

Sidd is the President & CEO of VDart, Inc., a leading Information Technology Staffing firm headquatered in Atlanta, GA. In little more than five years, it has transformed from a brand new firm to a major player on the IT services landscape. Touting nearly 500+ employees, with offices in Atlanta, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, UK and India, VDart provides IT staffing solutions to clients all over the globe.

Founded in 2007, VDart is laser focused on the core objective of finding the right IT professional in emerging technologies with the perfect mix of skills and experiences to meet the client’s business objectives. As a result that commitment and Sidd’s leadership, VDart has received numerous awards and honors recognizing its rapid growth and high achievement including being a Inc 500’s fastest growing privately held firms in U.S. for the past two years, earning ACG Fast 40’s 9th fastest growing company in Atlanta in 2013, and claiming rank on the Pacesetter Awards list for being the fastest growing privately held company in Atlanta for the past two years. Without question, VDart, is doing great things and is a shining example of how a certified MBE can leverage its resources to achieve exponential growth.

Today’s show is brought to you by Band of Coders.

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Atlanta Tech Leaders

Tony Lynn with Red Tree Labs and Kurt Uhlir with Sideqik

Justin Sacks with StartupPoint and Timothy C. Gaines with Mitel

Special Edition: Georgia CIO Leadership Association

Kris Maher with One Ring Networks, Lee Farabaugh with PointClear Solutions, and Sarah Lodato with The Iron Yard

Brad Anderson with MapR Technologies, Chad Adam and Ben Walle with Hopintop

Blake Patton with Tech Square Ventures, Mark Seeley with Intellinet and Nancy Treaster with Verint

Matthew Bivens – The Digital Marketing Guy, Paul Lizon with TixSameDay and Corregan Brown with ProjectLocker

Louie Bernstein with Izenda and Mike Slawson with Lumense

Jim Berryhill with DecisionLink and Sidd Ahmed with VDart

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