Directors
Peter Thoren
Peter is Executive Vice President of Access Industries, a private, U.S.-based investment firm with more than $4 billion under management in the energy, aluminum, technology, telecommunications, and financial services sectors.
Prior to joining Access in 2001, Peter was Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Walker Digital LLC, the founder of Priceline.com. Previously, he served in management positions with Salomon Inc and Citigroup working on various acquisitions, divestitures, and joint ventures. Peter graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Phi Beta Kappa), studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and received a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center. He is a member of the New York State Bar.
Martin McClanan
Martin is President of Sahalie, a designer and multi-channel retailer of innovative outdoor apparel. He is the former President of Flax art & design, as well as the former Chief Executive Officer of RedEnvelope, Inc (NASQ: REDE). Under his leadership, RedEnvelope morphed from a pure play e-commerce business into a leading multi-channel specialty retail brand leveraging catalogs in combination with substantial on-line marketing.
Martin started his career working in sales for the E&J Gallo Winery. Subsequently, he started his career in direct selling as the direct marketing manager for Nestle USA. Later, he leveraged this direct marketing experience to found and operate the Preview Catalog focused on specialty foods sold to the foodservice industry. Martin then served as the Practice Director for the digital commerce practice at Prophet Brand Strategy. While at Prophet, he oversaw projects focused on Internet brand management, international operations expansion and e-commerce enablement for companies such as Travelocity, Levi-Strauss, Williams-Sonoma, and Adidas. He also sits on the board of directors for Signature Wines. Martin holds a degree in business from the College of William and Mary and an MBA from the Darden School at the University of Virginia.
Advisors
Chaz Berman
Chaz is the Chief Executive Officer of the UCB Network, a provider of advertising and direct marketing loyalty solutions, specializing in retention, acquisition and personalized database marketing. He has established several successful consumer companies over the past three decades, and has a record of building shareholder value.
From 1998 through 2001, Chaz held a variety of senior executive posts of increasing responsibility at MyPoints.com, a leading direct and incentive marketing company. Mr. Berman built the Company's sales and client resources operations (comprising 135 professionals), growing annual revenue to $64 million in 2000 from zero two years earlier. Subsequent to the merger of Cybergold and MyPoints, and after the bursting of the Internet bubble, Chaz helped bring about the cash purchase of MyPoints.com by UAL Corp for $120 million.
Before joining MyPoints.com, Chaz was founder and president of two high-growth consumer companies: GoodStuffs, and WineWrights. Previous to those two businesses, he was EVP of Sales for Willitts Designs, a merchandising company acquired by Hallmark, Inc. At Willitts, Chaz profitably grew annual sales to $32 million from $1.5 million and managed more than 200 sales professionals.
Chaz holds a bachelor of arts from Case Western Reserve University and an MSBA in marketing from San Francisco State University.
Randy Korba
Randy is currently founder of answerjam. Earlier, Randy was the first executive hire at Notiva, a financial- and trade settlement-focused enterprise software company serving the retail and CPG industries. As VP of Business Development, he was responsible for the primary strategic and go-to-market efforts of the company.
Prior to Notiva, Randy was Director of Business Development for Amazon.com until late 1999. During his time at Amazon, the business development team was responsible for a large part of Amazon's growth in customer count from 3 million to over 11 million. Randy came to Amazon from Junglee, where from late 1997 he built and managed the Web Commerce business, deploying comparative shopping services with leading portals and media sites (Yahoo, etc.). During Randy's time with Junglee, the web commerce business was created, made its first dollar of revenue, and was sold to Amazon for over $200 million (in mid 1998).
Randy has served as a formal advisor to several companies and organizations, including PayPal, Yodlee, eLance and the South Bay Leukemia Society.
Randy received his MBA from Stanford University, and a BA in Economics from Northwestern University.
|
