goingon.com

Jon Corshen, Chief Executive Officer

Jon brings with him nearly 20 years of experience in helping to build successful enterprise and Internet software companies. Throughout his career, Jon has touched almost every aspect of software design, development, marketing & sales. Over the last 10 years, he has focused almost exclusively on the art of building and marketing successful technology start-ups, utilizing core expertise in product management, product marketing, marketing communications and consultative selling.

In 1996, Jon helped to found Tradex Technologies, and successfully lead the creation of an entirely new market segment for Digital Marketplace software. Tradex grew from 5 to over 125 employees, from $0 to $150M in revenue, and was sold to Ariba Technologies (a publicly held web commerce company) in 2000, for over $1.7B. Jon went on to become the VP of Corporate Strategy for Ariba between 2000 and 2003, helping to guide business and marketing strategy and leading several key acquisitions.

Prior to Tradex, he was the VP of Product Marketing at Walker Interactive Systems, a leading ERP system provider. During his time at Walker Interactive, Jon led the design and deployment of the solution that would become CommerceOne's (a successful ecommerce IPO company) flagship product. Jon began his career as a Developer and Sr. Analyst at Andersen Consulting (Accenture). He received his MS in Quantitative Economics from the University of California at San Diego.

Kurt Ackman, Executive Vice President of Academic Relations

Kurt Ackman has been an acknowledged leader in the higher education sales sector for over 15 years. At Apple Computer, he worked with colleges and universities throughout the Midwest and central United States. Ackman pioneered the Apple Campus Rep model, hiring and coaching hundreds of college students to assist with campus viral marketing efforts. He worked with premier accounts such as the University of Michigan and the University of Colorado to implement and test solutions such as QuickTime internet streaming, AirPort (WiFi), and Netboot before they went to market.

Kurt went on to join the sales leadership team at Blackboard, managing the sales teams for both the Northeast and Western regions of North America. As the Regional Vice President, his team managed the largest number of clients of any region, and had a subscription revenue of over $40M by selling software licenses, managed hosting, and professional consulting services. Kurt holds a BS in Accounting from the University of Nebraska.

David Thomson, CFA, Chief Financial Officer

David Thomson has a broad background spanning Investment Finance, Accounting, Operations, Technology, and Sales. Thomson has had a long career across the financial and technology sectors, having worked at both large and small firms. His last role was at Emotiv Systems, a venture-backed neuro-technology company, as the Director of Finance (acting CFO). While at Emotiv, Thomson also actively worked outside of Finance/Accounting in HR, Operations, Industry and Marketplace Research, and Business Development.

Prior to Emotiv, he was as Vice President - Investments & Wealth Management Finance for Merrill Lynch, acting as the Business Unit Controller for their $3B annual WRAP Accounts business. Prior to Merrill Lynch, Thomson was the Director of Finance (acting CFO) for Thaumaturgix, a year 2000 Inc. 500 systems integration firm, where he was hands-on in a wide array of functional areas. Thomson spent the first several years of his career in financial sales and investment analysis, including counseling college faculty at TIAA-CREF, founded by Andrew Carnegie to provide financial products for retirement for academia.

Thomson has both a Bachelor of Science in Finance and Information Systems, and a MBA, from New York University's Stern School of Business. He also holds the prestigious Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA®) designation.

Taneli Otala, Chief Technology Officer

Taneli brings 25 years of both hands-on and high-level management experience with distributed processing, networks, security and scalable storage to GoingOn. Taneli joins GoingOn most recently from Atomic Labs, makers of the Pion Data Stream Platform where he served as CTO. Previously as VP of Engineering at Jaxtr, the real-time global telephony and social networking company, Taneli re-architected scalability, security and database design as the company scaled from 100k to 10 million users.

Previous to Jaxtr, he served as VP Technology for Various, Inc., a holding company for some of the world's largest consumer web sites. At Various he oversaw the growth and maintenance of the network infrastructure and application architecture required to keep 700 domains, 40+ web sites with 200 million user accounts humming smoothly. Taneli has also held CTO or VP Engineering roles at MySQL, SenSage, Verano, Zambeel, Oracle and Otasoft. He studied electrical and mechanical engineering at the University of Oulu in his native Finland.

Melissa Loble, Vice President of Client Success

As the VP of Client Strategy at GoingOn, Melissa Loble works closely with higher education institutions to leverage the most effective collaborative learning technologies to implement successful, engaging learning communities. Her passion for improving the quality of education for students of all ages has remained strong throughout her 15 years working in higher education, K12 and corporate environments. As a frequent speaker at national and international industry conferences, Loble presents the pedagogical advantages to using educational technologies within higher education and K12 institutions.

Prior to joining GoingOn, Loble was the Senior Director for Solutions Engineering at Blackboard, Inc, a leading provider of educational technology solutions. In this role, she lead a team of individuals focused on helping higher education institutions & K12 districts manage and deploy highly effective learning technologies in order to maximize academic performance and minimize institutional costs. Before working for Blackboard, Loble served as the Director of Instructional Technology at the Graduate School of Education and Psychology at Pepperdine University and previously as the Director of Educational Technology at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

In addition to her role at GoingOn, Loble teaches in the Masters Program in Learning Technologies (MALT) for Pepperdine University. Over the past seven years, she has designed and taught a variety of courses for this program, including Managing Technology for Change, Curriculum & Technology, Leadership and the Practicing Professional. Loble received her MBA, with an emphasis in Management, and her master’s degree in Education Policy from Columbia University. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Beth Styles, Vice President of Product

As VP of Product at GoingOn Beth is responsible for all aspects of the product life cycle ensuring that we provide innovative solutions that deliver against our mission of building the connected campus and delighting our customers.

Prior to GoingOn Beth was Sr. Director of Product Management at SuccessFactors where she was responsible for defining strategy and delivery of its SaaS based enterprise social networking platform, CubeTree. As an early member of the CubeTree team, prior to the SuccessFactors acquisition, she built the product and customer success teams and went on to lead the Social Collaboration, Social Learning and Mobile initiatives for SuccessFactors. CubeTree was recognized as a visionary on the Gartner MQ for Social Software in the Workplace in 2009, only 18 months after founding, and in 2010 established an even stronger visionary position in this competitive and emerging market.

Beth has a passion for pioneering strategic initiatives and revolutionizing the way people work together and connect. She has extensive enterprise experience including SaaS, social, mobile, digital commerce, security, and identity management technologies and has worked at some of the leading companies in their space such as Symantec, PeopleSoft, Oracle and Vindicia. Beth started her career in curriculum development where she deployed education and certification programs incorporating instructor-led training, eLearning, specialized documentation, video, satellite and distance learning modalities to increase the performance and effectiveness of customers and partners. Beth has a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of California, Irvine.

Grant Hansen, Vice President of Strategic Accounts & Business Development

For the past 20 years, Grant has held a variety of roles and responsibilities related to the use of technology, content and services targeted to the Education, Learning and Development market. Grant has worked for organizations including Apple, Thomson NETg (a division of Thomson Learning), Blackboard, Element K (A division of NIIT) and Knowledge Factor (a learning software startup). At these organizations Grant has traditionally held roles in Sales Management and Business Development, working with customers or managing teams, focused on selling, implementing, integrating and custom development of learning solutions.