Board & Advisors

Sam Decker is Co-Founder and CEO of Mass Relevance, a social engagement platform that discovers, filters, and displays real-time content anywhere. Prior to Mass Relevance, Sam was founding Chief Marketing Officer at Bazaarvoice, the leader in Software as a Service (SaaS) social commerce technologies serving over 1,000 brands, where he was responsible for building the company’s brand, products and platform.

Before joining Bazaarvoice, Sam spent seven years of leadership at Dell, Inc. in marketing, online, CRM, and customer-centricity strategy. From 1999-2003, he led Dell’s consumer web site, building Dell.com into the largest consumer eCommerce site at $3.5B in annual sales, and established global best practices in merchandising, analytics, product management, and operations. Sam pioneered Dell’s customer-centricity strategy and customer segmentation using Six Sigma methodology.

Before Dell, Sam spent more than six years in the Bay Area leading marketing, sales and product strategy at B2B and media startups. Decker has authored two books on word of mouth marketing and serves on the boards of Monetate, Needle, New Era, and the digital advisory board for P&G.

Lucinda Duncalfe is Founder/CEO of Real Food Works, a start-up offering a subscription program of very healthy meals that are prepared by a network of local independent chefs and delivered fresh weekly. She is a serial entrepreneur, having founded and run a number of venture capital-backed technology companies. Most recently she was CEO of ClickEquations, an enterprise paid search management software-as-a-service company acquired by Channel Intelligence in 2011.

Prior to leading ClickEquations, Lucinda co-founded and led TurnTide, an anti-spam technology company. TurnTide was acquired by Symantec for $28 million only six months after founding. Lucinda also served as President & CEO of Destiny WebSolutions, a venture-backed Inc. 500 winner that provided Internet strategy and implementation consulting to large financial institutions. While growing Destiny from $250,000 to $25 million in revenue, Lucinda received many honors. She was named America’s 17th Most Influential Consultant by Consulting Magazine, won the Eastern Technology Council’s Enterprise Award for CEO of the Year, and was an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in Philadelphia. She was recently named the Iris Newman Award Female Entrepreneur of the Year.

In addition to her CEO roles, Lucinda has held management positions at Infonautics, Automated Call Processing, SEI Investments, and American Express, and she was an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at First Round Capital. Lucinda blogs at duncalfe.me and Tweets @LucindaD.

Josh is currently Managing Director of First Round Capital, a seed-stage venture fund. A serial entrepreneur and investor who has been an active leader in the Internet industry since its commercialization, Josh co-founded Infonautics Corporation in 1992 while he was a student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The company went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 1996.

Josh left Infonautics to found Half.com in July of 1999, and led it to become one of the largest sellers of used books, movies and music in the world. Half.com was acquired by eBay in July 2000 and Josh remained with eBay for three years, growing eBay’s Media marketplace to almost half a billion dollars in annual gross merchandise sales. In early 2004 Josh helped to found TurnTide, an anti-spam company acquired by Symantec.

Prior to forming First Round Capital, Josh served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Comcast Interactive Capital, a $350 million venture capital fund affiliated with Comcast Corporation. Josh is an inventor on eight U.S. Patents for his work in Internet technology. He is often quoted in industry trade journals and national newspapers, and is a frequent speaker at industry-wide conferences on entrepreneurship, Internet marketing and the future of Internet services.

Bryan is a widely followed thought leader in online marketing, and he is the Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestselling author of “Call to Action,” “Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?” and “Always Be Testing.” As a professional marketing speaker, Bryan has keynoted corporate events and conferences such as Search Engine Strategies, Shop.org, Direct Marketing Association, MarketingSherpa, E-consultancy, Webcom, SEM Konferansen Norway, and the Canadian Marketing Association.

Bryan is also the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Web Analytics Association and serves as an advisory board member of Search Engine Strategies, the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, and several other venture capital backed startup companies. He is on the board of trustees of the Direct Marketing Education Foundation.

Bryan was recently recognized by eConsultancy members as one of the top 10 User Experience Gurus and he was selected as one of the inaugural iMedia Top 25 Marketers. Read Bryan’s blog and follow him on Twitter @TheGrok.

Kevin has been described by his peers in the retail industry as both “an extraordinary thought leader in the online retail space” and “a cross-channel retail visionary with the leadership skills to make his vision a reality.”

As Vice President of E-commerce at Sur La Table, Kevin has more than 25 years of experience in retail and more than 10 years of senior management experience with online commerce. For example, as SVP of E-Business at Borders he served as the primary leadership and planning force of e-business strategies for Borders.com. Kevin championed an innovative and award-winning cross-channel retailing strategy and led the 2008 relaunch of Borders.com as an ecommerce site with cutting-edge interactive features like its Magic Shelf virtual bookshelf.

Kartik Hosanagar is a professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where he also serves as the Director of Wharton’s Venture Initiation program. Kartik´s research focuses on various aspects of aspects of Internet commerce, including digital media and Internet marketing.

Kartik has received several teaching awards including the MBA and Undergraduate Excellence in Teaching awards at the Wharton School. His research has received several awards, including the William Cooper award for best thesis in Management Science and the best paper award at the Consortium on Technology Policy and Management. Kartik is a cofounder of Yodle Inc, a venture-backed firm recently listed among the top 50 fastest growing private firms in the US, and is actively involved with several other startups as either an investor or board member.

Kartik is one of the youngest professors to be tenured at Wharton. He graduated as a valedictorian from Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences (BITS, Pilani), India with a Bachelors degree in Electronics and a Masters in Information Systems, and has an MPhil in Management Science and a PhD in Management Science and Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University.

Bob has been deeply involved in ecommerce for many years, serving on the Board of Directors for Shop.org, the online division of the National Federation of Retailers, for the past five years.

In 2010, Bob was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Sheplers Western Wear (Sheplers) after spending over eight years at QVC, Inc. where he served most recently as Senior Vice President of QVC.com, Multi-Media Platforms, Broadcast Operations & Technology, building the company’s nascent ecommerce business to over $1 billion in sales. Prior to that, Bob spent 15 years at JCPenney and JCP.com where he became a Merchandise Director in 1999.

Gene is a pioneer in digital media, travel, financial services and interactive marketing. He is CEO and co-founder of Tnooz, a global media brand and the leading source of travel technology news and analysis about the digital travel economy. He is the former Chairman of PhoCusWright, a travel industry research authority and producer of one of the most respected industry conferences.

Gene was General Manager of Tribune Company's team that made early-stage investments in America Online, Checkfree, Open Market, Excite, iVillage and Peapod in the mid-1990s. Gene was the first senior vice president, online and interactive at MTV Networks in 1997, and his team developed web platforms for the cable brands MTV, VH1 and Nickelodeon. He managed MTVN's online development network and content partnerships with Yahoo, AOL, Intel, Microsoft and other technology and distribution companies.

Since 1999, Gene has been an adviser to public and private companies in travel, media, marketing, financial services and web technology. He has served on advisory boards at BzzAgent, the MIT Media Lab and National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the birthplace of the Mosaic web browser. Gene is a former member of the boards of directors at Checkfree and Open Market and former chairman of the Henry's Fork Foundation, a non-profit conservation group in Idaho.

Elaine is an online retail pioneer who has spent the past 18 years building, managing, and advising direct-to-consumer businesses on their ecommerce and digital marketing initiatives. She developed and led such ecommerce giants as 1800flowers, iVillage, and the northeast practice of Amazon’s Enterprise Solutions.

Recognized by Advertising Age as one of the Top 20 Executives in Interactive Marketing, Elaine co-founded and chaired Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation and the world’s leading trade association for Internet retailing. She received the NRF 2008 Silver Plaque Award for her contribution to the retail industry.

Elaine is currently founder and Chief Prophet at Digital Prophets Network, a community of experts and thought leaders available to help advise and educate retailers in eCommerce strategy.