Company

Aron Ezra, Chief Executive Officer
Over the course of his career, Aron’s focus has been on helping his clients to understand how their customers and key audiences think, what information they want, and how best to influence and interact with them. Highlights include serving as a Senior Vice President at the global PR firm Hill & Knowlton, and as a Director at The Advisory Board Company, a consulting firm focused on the health care and higher education sectors. Sample past clients include: the Mayo Clinic, UCLA, Exxon-Mobil, IBM, Kellogg’s, Merck, Amgen, Johns Hopkins, Aetna, McKesson, Cigna, Qualcomm, Wal-Mart, Virgin, and many others. Aron is a frequent guest speaker on a wide range of business and technology topics, and has been invited to give more than 400 presentations at conferences and board retreats across the country. He has won numerous honors from organizations ranging from The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences to Harvard University. He received his bachelor’s degree with honors from Princeton, and did his graduate work at Yale.

Keith Michel, Chief Technology Officer
Keith Michel has well over a decade of experience building software platforms, leading development teams, implementing scalable frameworks, and bringing practical integrations to life. He is a passionate software and process specialist with a hunger for fresh ideas and unique applications. Keith has spent the majority of his career at start-up enterprises creating new software from the ground up. He was a software architect and development manager at Englishtown, Inc., currently thriving in its 12th year of existence, and the chief architect and technical director at HiWired, Inc., recently acquired by Radialpoint, Inc. In 2004, Keith was tapped to build the Educational Resource Center at the Boston Museum of Science, commissioned by the National Center for Technology Literacy.

Keith’s specialties include designing massively scalable software platforms, building technology-enabled service solutions, web applications, implementing SDLC methodologies, hands-on software design and programming, and database design. Keith received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Board of Advisors

Sung Park
Sung Park is the President and Founder of Umagination Labs LLC. Umagination Labs is a Joint Venture between IDEO, one of the world’s leading design and innovation firms and WPP, one of the top global marketing agencies. The company creates new brands, invents, patents, market researches and designs innovative, proprietary platforms for growth for large branded manufacturers and retailers. . He is a named inventor on over 200 patents and applications. He is the Chairman of a wireless joint venture – Archimedes and the CEO of an Eco-Beverage Spin-out called Greater Good Inc..

Sung was the CEO and founder of Custom Clothing Technology Corp which was the basis of the Levi’s Custom Fitted Blue Jean program. He was also the CEO and founder of a business model innovation company called Perpetual Motion Ventures, which created new business models in telecom/wireless, travel, financial services, software and media. He has a broad background of over 20 years of experience in technology, communications, artificial intelligence, databases and as a general partner in venture capital. He has also worked at IDEO as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence.

He has also served on the boards of and/or was often the first investor or advisor in companies such as: Frictionless Commerce (sold to SAP), Entitlenet (sold to BEA), Passkey, PlanetAll (sold to Amazon), Thinq (sold to Saba), Rational Investors (sold to McGraw Hill), Constant Contact (IPO) Koko Fitness, Dimensional Insight, Velti N.A.(IPO), Myomo (Medical Devices), Fashion Playtes and Zyrra.

Dr. Paul C. Brown
Dr. Paul C. Brown is principal software architect at TIBCO Software Inc. and the author of Succeeding With SOA: Realizing Business Value Through Total Architecture and Implementing SOA: Total Architecture In Practice. His model-based tool architectures are the foundation of a diverse family of applications that design distributed control systems, process control interfaces, internal combustion engines, and NASA satellite missions. Dr. Brown is the author of the TIBCO-standard development methodology, applicable to both the creation of new enterprise architectures and the evolution of existing architectures that include custom, legacy, and commercial software. The methodology includes a technique for enterprise-scale load estimation and capacity planning, supported with semi-automated load analysis tools.

Dr. Brown received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Dr. Neal Hogan
Dr. Neal Hogan is a Director at the boutique consulting firm BDC Advisors. Dr. Hogan began his career as a lecturer and teaching fellow at Harvard University, teaching seminars in the history of science with a focus on 20th Century history and sociology of medicine. Prior to joining BDC Advisors, he served as Managing Director and Principal of the Advisory Board Company in Washington, DC, and as part of the team that took the company public in 2001. During his tenure, he managed content development and delivery for the Health Care Advisory Board’s flagship research program, “The CEO Sessions,” and also created the Advisory Board Academies. He also developed the model for H*Works, a consulting practice within the Advisory Board.

Dr. Hogan received his Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of New Hampshire, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in the History of Science.

Dr. Stuart Zoble
Dr. Stuart Zoble is a mathematician whose primary research focus is Mathematical Logic and its applications. He spent two years as a research associate at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and held faculty positions at both the University of Toronto and at Wesleyan University. He has lectured and published widely, with papers appearing in both the Proceedings and the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, Fundamenta Mathematicae, Topology and its Applications, and the Journal of Symbolic Logic, among others.

Dr. Zoble holds an M.A. in Economics from Yale University where he was a University Fellow, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Vince Coppola
Mr. Vince Coppola is President and CEO of Triad Healthcare, a leading specialty benefits management company that provides innovative musculoskeletal and pain management solutions to health plans, insurance carriers, employer groups, unions and government entities. Previously, he led business development and strategy for Blue Shield of California, a major health plan with roughly $10 billion in annual revenue. Before that, Mr. Coppola was an investment banker with JPMorgan in New York, a financial strategist at General Electric, and head of corporate development at Magellan Health Services, where he helped transform Magellan into a stronger, more diversified company through a series of key acquisitions. He also founded and ran a highly successful online retail wine company that he sold to Wine.com in 2007.

Mr. Coppola serves on the Board of Directors of Point Judith Capital, a venture capital firm based in Rhode Island, and holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Bryant University.

Eskander Matta
Mr. Eskander Matta is an ecommerce and business technology expert. He has served in a wide variety of senior roles: from Chief Strategy Officer at Bates Interactive, to Director of Strategic Services at Organic (where he often wrote business plans and built financial models for startups), to his current role as Vice President of Business Transformation and eBusiness at Blue Shield of California, where he oversees all online efforts for the company. Previously, as Senior Vice President of Internet Services for banking giant Wells Fargo, he oversaw an annual P&L of over $80 million, and managed hundreds of people across multiple areas, including the flagship wellsfargo.com site and the company’s online payments and mobile banking businesses.

Mr. Matta began his career as a strategic management consultant for Mercer and CSC, and as an investment banker for CS First Boston in New York, where he completed over $8 billion in transactions. He currently serves on the board of MobilePass (a mobile wallet and identity management solution for students) and Aegis Financial Corporation (a $500 million mutual fund manager). He graduated magna cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley with a dual degree in Economics and History. He received his MBA from Harvard Business School.