-
James Ladd (President)
James Ladd is the co-founder and President of Vertascale. Prior to Vertascale James worked as Director of MapSearch at deCarta Inc and spent seven years at eBay, most recently as Principal Product Manager for Search. James has deep experience with Big Data analytics, having worked on eBay’s first Teradata installation in 2003. James’s team was the first to install Hadoop in a production setting at eBay in 2007. James is the co-inventor on several patents related to web site optimization. He received his BBA from Wilfird Laurier University.
-
Geoff Hendrey (CTO)
Geoff Hendrey is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Vertascale. Geoff has founded two previous companies: Gravitate, a pioneer in social networking and location search (acquired in 2001), and NextDB.net the first cloud hosted “web 2.0″ database. Geoff has eight patents in algorithms and data mining, including social networking & location, and has spoken to technical audiences at Java One and AJAX World. Geoff served as the co-chair of the OGC’s Open Location Services working group and was instrumental in the development of the OpenLS standard in his previous role as Product Architect for MapSearch for deCarta. Geoff received his Masters Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
-
Laurie Iwami (Director of Marketing)
Laurie Iwami is the Director of Marketing for Vertascale. Laurie has over 20 years of marketing, communications and advertising expertise. She has held consulting and senior marketing roles for consumer electronics and software companies including HDMI Licensing, LLC, NVIDIA and Sun Microsystems. As Director of Account Services for LVL Interactive, one of Silicon Valley’s first interactive agencies, her client base included Acer, NEC, Philips and Cisco Systems. Laurie attended Brown University and has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University.
-
Gene De Lisa (Sr. Software Developer)
Gene De Lisa is a Sr. Software Developer for Vertascale. With over 30 years of Object Oriented software development, Gene has been programming in C and UNIX since 1984, Java since 1995, and C++ since 1988. He has also done extensive software development using Objective-C and smalltalk. He has written everything from pSos microcode to dsp assembly language to UNIX device drivers. Over the course of his career, Gene has worked for companies of all sizes, from small start-ups to large multinational corporations. Gene is an accomplished musician: He earned a Doctorate in computer music composition from the University of North Texas, and has been a performance lecturer for the Princeton Symphony Orchestra.
-
Lee Paries (Advisor)
Lee Paries has more than 20 years of sales and sales management experience in both large enterprise and early stage start-up companies. Lee is currently a Vice President at Teradata Aster, where he joined the company while still in stealth mode as the first sales and alliances business hire through the successful acquisition of the company by Teradata in May 2011. Lee’s career has included working in the health care, social media, retail, financial, telecommunications and media and entertainment industries. Lee received B.A. degrees in Marketing and International Business from Illinois State University
-
Richard Shane (Advisor)
Rich Shane is an entrepreneur. He is currently in the process of building his fourth company, called Rocket Fizz, to be the nation’s leading candy and soda store chain. Previously, he started three companies: The 3DO Company (member of the founding team), HomeWarehouse (CEO), and MediaMaster (CEO). Rich has worked at Intel Capital where he led investments in Internet content and commerce companies in the U.S., Asia, and Latin America. He has also worked at eBay in Category Management and Strategic Planning. Rich earned an MBA from Harvard University and a BS in Math and Computer Science from UCLA.
-
Alfred Mandel (Advisor)
Alfred Mandel has been an entrepreneur since his teens and has over thirty years experience in technology businesses, notably at Apple Computer and Redgate Communications. Known as a “company builder”, Alfred has advised and invested in many Internet related, ventures including: Ask Inc, Google, MetaLINCS, N8 Systems, NextBio, PowerSet and many others. Alfred co-founded and ran Tenex Medical Investors, which become this country’s largest angel investor group for the health and life sciences. Alfred holds a degree in Environmental Studies from UC Santa Barbara an MA in Environmental Design, and a Masters in Urban and Regional planning, both from the School of Architecture at the University of Oregon.
-
Michael Gardner (Advisor)
Mike Gardner has had over 40 years of experience in high technology companies. His career in hi-tech began at IBM, and includes several CEO assignments in early stage start-ups and larger companies, including: Ungermann Bass’s IPO, ACC and Blue Pumpkin. Most recently Mike served as CEO at Quantivo, a cloud based SaaS company delivering analytics on Big Data. Mike attended Villanova University, and currently serves on the university’s Board of Advisors.
