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Oct 1, 2021 | 15 minute read
written by Andra Scortzaru
We wanted to take this time to introduce you to our leadership team – you may see some new faces in the mix and we can’t wait to tell you more about these individuals.
Connect with Brenton on LinkedIn
Brenton is responsible for Elastic Path's revenue strategies, profitability enhancement and cash flow. Brenton was most recently Senior Vice President at Peer 1 Hosting, one of the world's leading web hosting providers specializing in managed hosting, colocation and cloud services. Prior to that, Brenton worked in Business Development at Signacert, a leading company specializing in continuous compliance monitoring automation. Brenton also spent five years with Intel Capital, Intel Corp.'s venture capital arm in both Europe and the U.S.
Q&A with Brenton
1. What excites you most about Elastic Path daily?
The people, and the challenges presented every day. Building companies is exciting and relentless. We are lucky to have a fantastic team of entrepreneurs that inspire and challenge each other day in and day out. It is often joked, “Why do we do this!?” And the answer, never needs an answer.
2. How do you foresee Commerce changing in the future? How will Elastic Path help customers maneuver said changes?
As the transformation from analogue to digital accelerates, I believe the concept of “buying something” becomes an antiquated concept. Our needs become imbedding in life; the refrigerator knows we are out of milk and orders for delivery our preferred brand. Our wants become experiences. This will apply throughout B2C B2B2C and B2B as customer expectations are mirrored in business. Elastic Path has, and continues to, enable our customers to deliver these our emerging digital world.
3. What is your favorite book and or movie and why?
The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. It is an annual read and reminder that while personal and team experience grows, there is no playbook for building a fast-growing company in an emerging technology market. And that the right decisions, are often the hardest.
4. Tell us something about yourself, that isn't on LinkedIn or your resume.
Whether snow, street or surf, if you can ride a plank sideway on it, I am in!
Connect with Riccardo on LinkedIn
Riccardo is responsible for Product Development and Operations for all digital commerce solution offerings at Elastic Path. Riccardo has 25 years of demonstrated success in building digital products and developing world-class technical teams. His background includes product development, digital transformation, technology architecture for early stage to Fortune 500 companies, with extensive experience delivering industry leading PaaS/SaaS services.
Prior to Elastic Path, Riccardo was the Vice President of Engineering for Acquia, which was acquired by Vista Equity Partners at the end of 2019. During his tenure at Acquia, he was instrumental to launch new products, which led to double digit growth and significant gross margins improvement. Prior to this he was VP of Engineering at global agency Isobar, the digital arm of Dentsu Aegis Media.
Q&A with Riccardo
We work on very interesting problems every day, from building new features to auto-scaling our infrastructure to support our client events. The teams we have at EP are incredibly talented and everyone has been incredibly supportive during these interesting times.
I remember placing orders online once every couple weeks, now I do it multiple times per day. Commerce is part of what we do every day and we need to meet our customers and their customers where they want, which at times is not just a web site. We solve this problem with the simplicity of our headless solutions.
In this last year one of the books I've enjoyed a lot is Where the crawdads sing by Delia Owens. Intriguing story embedded in a beautiful natural setting.
I love to spend time outside with my family playing/watching soccer/futbol, hiking and mountain biking.
Connect with Bryan on LinkedIn
Bryan is the SVP of Product and Customer Success at Elastic Path, where he leads the UX and product management teams. Previously, Bryan was the Chief Commercial Officer at Neural Magic, a deep learning software start-up where he ran Product, GTM, and Customer Success. An Acquia founding team member, he helped lead the company to $170+M in revenue. His expertise spans machine learning, digital experience platforms, and open-source technology.
He is known as a serial entrepreneur and has spoken at digital business conferences around the globe. Bryan has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a degree in Brewing from the Siebel Institute of Technology, the oldest brewing school in the United States. Before becoming Senior Vice President of WW Account Management at Acquia, Bryan ran product marketing for content management solutions at EMC Documentum. He also brewed beer professionally for 8 years.
Q&A with Bryan
Our customers are what get me the most excited each day at Elastic Path. I am obsessed with making our customers and partners successful with their digital commerce objectives. To accomplish this, I focus my time on building teams that are passionate about solving problems for our customers, and then enabling our customers and partners to address those challenges with a combination of products, enablement, and a shared sense of purpose.
In my opinion, the future of Commerce will be “best for me” approaches to quickly build and launch new commerce experiences. The monolithic, all in one era of commerce is over, replaced with API-first approaches to developing modern applications. This trend is changing is happening across enterprise technology markets broadly, impacting how people evaluate, develop, and deploy new technologies to deliver business objectives. The digital commerce market will follow suit.
To help our customers and partners navigate this change, my product teams are focused on making the process of evaluating and building commerce solutions with our products easier than ever. Accelerating time to value for both developers and business users and eliminating friction along the way is one of our key objectives. By doing so, we enable our customers and partners to spend more time building exceptional, differentiated digital commerce experiences - while we take care of the complex bits behind our APIs.
I have two favorite books of late. The first is Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. His insights into how our minds work, the heuristics we each use to make decisions, and the tricks we all fall prey to are fascinating. The second book is a novel, Slade House by David Mitchell. A mystery thriller set in London - a creepy, fun read that keeps you unsettled to the end.
I am a big music fan and have a tendency to go down the rabbit hole with artists, now that all the music they’ve ever recorded is available on our phones. Recently, it’s been Miles Davis’ electric period, Sun Ra, and currently I’m lost in Bob Dylan. Movies, books, podcasts, and playlists, all the things.
Discover the steps for getting started, how to implement your front-end, considerations for choosing the right platform and more with our full guide.
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn
As Vice President of Marketing, Greg leads go-to-market strategy for Elastic Path, including product marketing, demand generation, brand, content marketing, corporate communications, analyst relations, events, field marketing, customer marketing. Greg is focused on providing both technical and business leaders with content and programs that help them deliver innovative commerce strategies that accelerate revenue growth.
Greg joined the Elastic Path team through the Moltin acquisition, where he held the role of Vice President of Marketing. Prior to Moltin, Greg held marketing and sales leadership positions at SmartBear, Akamai, and Intel. Greg began his career in IT systems management. Greg has a bachelors degree in Computer Information Systems from Bentley University and a MBA from the University of Notre Dame.
Q&A with Greg
Hands down, the team. We have an amazing team that is smart, dedicated, and a ton of fun, and it’s what I love about my job. I also really enjoy the digital commerce space because it’s so broad reaching and dynamic, and has become even more mission-critical for our customers in the face of the pandemic.
Digital commerce is becoming more and more immersive into our daily lives. eCommerce isn’t a place we go to shop anymore, rather eCommerce is woven into how we live our daily lives. For example, you can order via phone through an amazon Alexa, through an in-car dashboard, right within an email, and more.
I have a few favorite books – Extreme Leadership, Atlas Shrugged, and for all you content marketing geeks out there, They Ask You Answer. In terms of movies, I love watching Home Alone every Christmas season.
I have three young kids, and through them have developed a deep passion for coaching youth sports. It’s so fun and gratifying to work with young kids to help them realize their full potential, build their confidence, and understand the importance of teamwork and sportsperson-ship.
Connect with Tara on LinkedIn
Tara leads the People & Culture and Facilities teams at Elastic Path. With a long tenure in building teams, designing programs, and leading through change, Tara will focus on ensuring our people programs and practices are firmly established, driving a culture and performance which attract and retain top talent within our markets.
Tara brings over 15 years of Human Resource experience supporting executive leadership at industry leading organizations across industries such as hospitality, real estate and retail. Throughout her career, Tara has established relationships through executive coaching, change leadership and as a devoted employee advocate.
Tara holds a Bachelor of Arts from Queen’s University and a post graduate certificate in Strategic Human Resources Management from Royal Roads University.
Q&A with Tara
This is such a unique time to be part of an organization that is on the cusp of incredible growth and change at this stage of maturity. We have the expertise of a seasoned group of subject matter experts, combined with new additions and ideas for innovation, all driving us to create opportunities for our employees and customers that haven’t existed in the past. This team is uniquely posed to achieve great success.
I see commerce becoming increasingly accessible to a global community, blasting through barriers that existed historically. In my opinion this opens up a world of possibility, potential and learning which works to lower barriers that have may have previously deterred some. It enables visibility for a much broader audience, sparks curiosity and encourages pushing beyond what we’ve previously thought possible.
Any and all works by Haruki Murakami. I am a huge fan of fiction in my down time and Murakami’s language, imagination and style are simply magic.
I have a goal to retire on a farm, where I can care for a herd of rescue animals, or at the very least several dogs, and where my partner can ski daily during the winters. We have our eye on Sun Peaks in the interior of BC at the moment, but I am wide open to recommendations if anyone has a utopic location to share.
Connect with Darren on LinkedIn
Darren Hedges is the Vice President, Business Transformation and Professional Services. He leads the Business Transformation Group and the Global Professional Services team. Darren has over 25 years of technology change leadership and professional services experience.
Over the course of his career, Darren has led teams at Disney Interactive Studios, Electronic Arts, LucasArts (A LucasFilm Company) Eidos, holding various leadership roles for interactive entertainment, franchise, and application development.
Darren is driven to create and enable passionate development teams, build effective and scalable development processes, and drive customer implementation success.
Q&A with Darren
The people in PS, the PS projects, the clients that we work with and the business and commerce challenge we help them overcome every day.
It’s already happening, commerce everywhere, the ability to transact from any device in any shape way or form. EP already enables their customers in this first wave, but as technology evolves and methods transcend the card, digital wallets, NFT devices and currencies, EP will be right there taking a leadership position and pushing the boundaries of what commerce means and how business, individuals and companies act and react to it.
Favorite Movie – Airplane – I could watch that movie a thousand times (and I nearly have) and it would still make me laugh. The casting was perfect with Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty and Leslie Nielsen, the script genius and the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams are masterful in their writing and directing craft.
Before I went into Project Management and interactive entertainment, I used to be a ship to shore crane operator in my early working years I’d spend long winters huddled in a small box suspended 500 feet above a rocking container ship loading and unloading containers freezing. That being said the summer months perched on top of a crane has their advantages, so there are upsides!