Management

• Ethan Stock

  Founder & Chief Executive Officer

  Ethan co-founded Zvents in early 2005 with funding from NetService Ventures Group, where he has served as a partner since 2002. Ethan brings a diverse background in scholarship and technology to the pursuit of entrepreneurial ventures. In 1996, while in graduate school at UC Berkeley on an NSF fellowship, he founded Bamboo Systems, an early entrant in the CRM market. In 2000, he served as COO of eBusinessMedia, the B2B Internet arm of UK publisher United News & Media, where he oversaw the launch of multiple industry-focused internet content and commerce properties, including the first deployment of CommerceOne in Europe. A programmer since he was ten years old, Ethan worked as a systems engineer at EDS and was a principal consultant at strategy firm The McKenna Group in the late 1990s. He holds a B.A. in History from The Ohio State University.

  

  Ethan Stock

  Likes: Wine, travel

  Dislikes: Cheap chocolate, slow drivers

  Fast Facts: Ethan built his first piece of furniture when he was three years old. He was industrious even as a wee lad.

• Tyler Kovacs

  Founder & Chief Architect

  Tyler founded Zvents and is the driving force behind its “secret sauce” – responsible for developing Zvents products and underlying technology, including software development, architectural design, automated testing, systems installation and administration, and database design and administration. For more than 10 years, he has created dynamic websites powered by open-source frameworks and databases.
  Prior to Zvents, Tyler built a number of customer-facing and internal web-based applications both professionally for startups including Narus and Network Physics – but also as a volunteer for several nonprofit organizations, including the San Francisco Food Bank. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from McGill University.

  

  Tyler Kovacs

  Likes: Live music, comedy

  Dislikes: Global warming, sock puppets

  Fast Facts: Tyler founded Zvents in hopes of finding local piñata-making classes. Mission accomplished.

• Paul Denton

  Chief Financial Officer

  Paul brings more than 20 years of leadership to Zvents from a wide variety of industries and management positions. As an executive with numerous start-up and emerging growth companies in Silicon Valley, Paul's expertise in financial management and business operations helped numerous companies successfully reach an acquisition or their next level of business. His background includes management positions at Booz Allen Hamilton and Exxon/Esso Petroleum Company and served as CFO at Determina and COO/CFO at Andale. He holds his MBA from Stanford University and a BS with Honors in Chemical Engineering from University of Birmingham, UK.

  

  Paul Denton

  Likes: Bike riding, watching sports

  Dislikes: Drivers who turn without signaling, olives

  Fast Facts: Paul is a nationally licensed soccer trainer who coaches two youth teams.

• Alisa Weiner

  Senior Vice President Marketing & Product

  Alisa brings more than 20 years experience in strategic management and marketing to the Zvents team, with specific expertise in ecommerce and vertical search. A talented and experienced executive who makes decisions with the right mix of analytical skills and time trained intuition, Alisa has led brand building, customer acquisition/retention and product management for startups and established global brands. Prior to joining Zvents, Alisa was Vice President and GM at Shopping.com (an eBay company) overseeing strategy and business operations for Shopping.com, DealTime and Epinions. As a Vice President and founding employee at Hotwire she helped launch and grow a category leader that was acquired by IAC/Expedia in 2003. Alisa began her career at Levi Strauss & Co. as a product and marketing manager. She holds a BA in Literature from the University of California, Davis.

  

  Alisa Weiner

  Likes: Live music, the SF Giants, spa vacations

  Dislikes: Traffic, missing the good stuff, soggy fries

  Fast Facts: Alisa is an artist and writer. She hopes to publish her first children's book, Quiet in My House, in early 2010.

• Derek Hanson

  Vice President Sales

  Derek brings more than 18 years experience in media sales to the Zvents team, with specific expertise in content monetization, local search and strategic planning. Fast and forward thinking, Derek's insight into the sales process, knowledge of the sales environment and tenacity have been well regarded assets to companies including Time Warner and Comcast - where he filled Vice President and General Manager roles. He has built sales organizations from the ground up and created unique environments within the corporate media culture, where individuals with talent and initiative were developed at every level. He holds a BS in Marketing from California State University-Northridge.

  

  Derek Hanson

  Likes: Cigars, fast cars, wine and a sharp razor

  Dislikes: The word “no”

  Fast Facts: Derek is an amateur photographer and aspiring filmmaker. He has targeted May 12, 2017 for the release of his first feature film.

• Kirt Thomson

  Senior Director of Business Development

  Kirt, an entrepreneur at heart, understands it takes focused execution, discipline and prioritization to get a new business off the ground. He flat out gets deals done while making all sides feel they won. With 20+ years of high tech leadership, he built and managed successful sales and business development teams at market leading software companies like Oracle and Netscape. At Niku, he helped define a new software category while running the Vertical Markets Organization and growing the company from start-up to a $200m IPO. Most recently Kirt served as the VP of Sales for Encover, a leader in channel services solutions. He also worked in corporate strategy for Disney while completing his MBA in Entrepreneurship and Marketing at UCLA. He holds a B.A. in Human Biology from Stanford University where he serves on the Buck/Cardinal Board of Directors.

  

  Kirt Thomson

  Likes: Outdoor adventures with his family, good wine, live music

  Dislikes: Plane delays, poorly planned events

  Fast Facts: Kirt lived overseas in New Zealand for 18 months helping build Oracle AsiaPac and sampling the adventuresome Kiwi lifestyle.

• Doug Judd

  Principal Search Architect

  Doug has over a decade of software engineering experience in the area of information retrieval. Early in his career he joined Verity, Inc. as an engineer where he helped build the core VDK developer toolkit. He subsequently moved on to Inktomi, Inc. where he spent five years in both engineering and management positions in the crawling and indexing group of the Web Search division. He designed and implemented the indexing system used for indexing web content for the Web Search service. Most recently, Doug worked with Kosmix, Inc. where he built a distributed web crawler and scaled it to a billion documents. Doug earned a B.S. in Computer Science from U.C. Santa Barbara in 1992 and holds four patents in search technology.

  

  Doug Judd

  Likes: Acoustic guitar, robot demolition derby

  Dislikes: Fluorescent lighting, suits

  Fast Facts: Doug is an occasional adventure-seeker who once bungee jumped off a bridge on the south island of New Zealand.

• Gordon Rios

  Scientific Advisor

  Gordon is a proven leader in search and search-related technologies. Over the past 10 years he has focused his efforts on devising machine learning systems for web search, document classification, and text mining. At Inktomi he developed the scoring engine for a user click-based ranking application that was deployed at HotBot and Snap, was a major contributor to the Directory Engine product which classified millions of web documents into over 10,000 categories, and was a founding member of Inktomi's Web Search Relevance Group. Moving to Proofpoint, an enterprise messaging company, he led the development of the award-winning MLX(tm) technology used in their industry leading anti-spam product. Most recently Gordon worked at Yahoo! in the International Relevance team, where he worked on all aspects of search engine relevance and developed production code running in all major international markets. Gordon holds an MBA in Finance and a master's degree in Engineering and Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley. His Erdös number is 4.

  

  Gordon Rios

  Likes: Political debate, dachschunds

  Dislikes: Spam, irrational greed

  Fast Facts: Gordon once aspired to be a secret agent, but instead became a search technologist who likes strategy games.

• Board of Directors

  • Laura Brege
    Laura Brege, General Partner at Red Rock Ventures and current EVP & Chief Business Officer at Onyx Pharmaceuticals. She also held senior financial positions at COR Therapeutics, Flextronics, and The Cooper Companies.
  • Richard Harroch
    Richard Harroch, Managing Director and Global Head of M&A at VantagePoint Venture Partners, has been involved in negotiating and structuring numerous Internet-related partnerships, distribution, e-commerce, online advertising and investment transactions. He founded LawCommerce.com (sold to LexisNexis) and co-founded AllBusiness.com (sold to Dun & Bradstreet), and is a noted author of several legal and business books.
  • John Gardner
    John Gardner, Partner at Nokia Growth Partners, has led and managed investments in companies across the information technology spectrum. He was one of the founding partners at BlueRun Ventures before joining Nokia Growth Partners, and has extensive experience advising and working with start-up and emerging businesses.
  • Paul Levine
    Paul Levine, President of New Media at Current, has over a dozen years of consumer internet and online media experience including executive roles at AdBrite, Yahoo, and E*TRADE. Under Paul's leadership, Yahoo! Local grew to reach over 20 million US unique users and became widely recognized as the industry's leading local search and content destination.
  • Paul Martino
    Paul Martino, CEO of Aggregate Knowledge, was the founding CTO of Tribe.net and founding CEO of Ahpah Software, a Java security company. He previously held business development positions at Intertrust and SkyPilot.
  • Doug Power
    Doug Power, Vice President of Corporate Development at NAVTEQ Corporation, is responsible for executing the company’s inorganic growth strategy through acquisitions, investments, and strategic partnerships. Prior to NAVTEQ, Doug was Director of Corporate Development at Lucent Technologies Inc. and Vice President of Mergers & Acquisitions at Merrill Lynch & Co. in New York City.
  • Jason Whitt
    Jason Whitt, Vice President at VantagePoint Venture Partners, serves their Information Technology Group focusing on digital media, wireless, and consumer oriented technology investments. He was responsible for acquisitions, venture investing, and corporate strategy for Cisco Systems' Corporate Business Development group and has worked with Xros, Nortel Networks, and TransVascular (acquired by Medtronic).
  • Ethan Stock
    Ethan Stock, Founder and CEO of Zvents.