Jeremy Verba
CEO

Jeremy Verba is responsible for driving corporate direction and overall business strategy of Piczo. With nearly 20 years of experience, Jeremy brings extensive Internet and interactive business execution acumen in media, entertainment, communications and online services to Piczo.

Most recently, Jeremy was general manager and vice president of AOL's Voice Services division, where he and his team created a division with five premium services, totalling over one million subscribers. The stand-alone division was profitable a year ahead of plan and formed the foundation for the recent launch of AOL's Voice over IP service, Total Talk.

Prior to AOL, Jeremy was President and COO of HearMe (formerly Mpath Interactive), a publicly-traded company focused on multiplayer gaming, live online communities and the early VoIP initiatives targeted at both the consumer and carrier markets. Jeremy transformed the company to VoIP focus by shifting revenue sources and reducing expenses, and grew the company from 120 employees to over 270.

Additionally, Jeremy was founder and President of E! Online, one of the first businesses focused on delivering entertainment news and services online. Under Jeremy's leadership, E! Online was profitable in three years. The company broke through many of the initial barriers in the online content space, including live web-casts, major advertising by film studios and television networks, and e-commerce initiatives targeted at the entertainment consumer. E! Online is still the leading entertainment news and information site on the Internet.

Jeremy is originally from Toronto, Canada and is a graduate of MIT and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Jim Conning
Founder and Vice President, Products

As founder of Funtigo, Jim wrote the proprietary software engine that powers Piczo. Wisdom gained from the Funtigo service led to the launch of Piczo in 2004.

Before Funtigo, Jim was engaged for three years at Charles Schwab as a senior software developer. Jim worked on the Schwab.com online trading website, and took a lead role in various technical initiatives.

Prior to his time at Charles Schwab, Jim participated in Passpoints.com, a dot com era start-up which offered a turnkey online customer loyalty program. Jim served as the lead engineer and built and led the development team that consisted of several engineers.

Before joining Passpoints, Jim was a senior engineer with Oracle Consulting, where he participated in a national performance tuning group that worked on-site at Fortune 500 companies. He also participated in the development and release of the Oracle 8 database server.

Previously, he spent five years in the digital map industry, working on the data and software that is used in vehicle navigation systems. Jim spent most of that time working at NavTeq, which today supplies Yahoo Maps and Google Maps with their mapping data.

Jim grew up in Berkeley, California and has a BS degree from the University of California at Davis.

Sandy Khaund
Chief Operating Officer

Sandy is responsible for product management, development and marketing of the Piczo on-line properties. Sandy has several years of high-tech experience, starting in hands-on engineering roles and advancing through product management, business management, and general management roles.

Before coming to Piczo, Sandy spent six years at Microsoft in increasing roles of responsibility and experience. Most recently, Sandy was Director of the Microsoft.com Community Technologies Team. In this role, Sandy managed a portfolio of on-line applications to support Microsoft's product groups and global subsidiaries in their efforts to connect and interact with millions of customers. In addition to managing sites such as GotDotNet, forums.microsoft.com, and blogs.msdn.com, Sandy co-founded CodePlex, Microsoft's on-line solution to support collaborative development of open source software. Before that, Sandy also held the role of Group Product Manager for the patterns & practices team, which was dedicated to optimizing.NET solutions in the enterprise, providing guidance on building applications for Windows Server, SQL Server, and the .NET Framework.

Prior to Microsoft, Sandy held a variety of positions across a diverse set of industries. During business school, Sandy spent time as a management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group as well as providing independent consulting services to a variety of on-line startups. Before business school, Sandy founded a small startup to design low-bandwidth multimedia solutions to support the music industry.

Previously, Sandy was an Applications Engineer for the Intel Developer Relations Group, supporting clients such as Electronic Arts and Access Software to optimize their games for Pentium architectures. Sandy began his career as a hardware engineer for Lockheed Martin, designing aerospace ground control equipment to communicate with GPS satellites in space. Sandy has published several technical papers and been awarded three patents over the course of his career.

Sandy holds a BA in Physics from Ithaca College, BSEE & M.Eng from Cornell University, and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.

Derek Rudd
Vice President of North American Sales

Derek is responsible for driving advertising sales in North America at Piczo.

Most recently, Derek was vice president of Consumer Ad Sales at Fox Interactive Media's IGN Entertainment, a leading Internet media and services provider focused on the videogame and entertainment enthusiast markets. Derek helped lead the company to profitability, positioning IGN as an entertainment destination beyond its roots as a gaming property. In his seven years at IGN, Derek led a team of over 20 sales professionals who worked with consumer advertisers to reach the elusive, young adult audience. IGN was acquired by News Corporation in October 2006, concurrently with News Corp's acquisition of MySpace.

Prior to joining IGN, Derek worked for Publicitas/Globe Media, a respected Los Angeles magazine representation firm. He was responsible for advertising revenue in the Southwest Region and worked with a diverse list of top publications including American Express Publishing's Travel + Leisure, Time Inc's Mutual Funds Magazine, and Sailing/Cruising World.

Fluent in Japanese, Derek began his career at Taisho Seiyaku, Japan's number one pharmaceutical company, where he worked directly with Japan's top advertising agencies, Dentsu (Coca Cola) and Hakuhodo.

Derek received his BS in international business and marketing at the University of Utah.

Peter J. van Pruissen
Chief Financial Officer

Peter is responsible for all financial, accounting, HR and administrative functions at the company. Peter has over 20 years experience which spans financial planning and analysis as well as systems and administration functions.

Prior to Piczo, Peter had a number of roles at ON24, Inc., the webcast services provider, before becoming chief financial officer at the company. Highlights of his time at ON24 include overseeing multiple rounds of venture financing and guiding the company through its early internet growth phase as a start-up online financial news network, and then managing the subsequent restart and aggressive growth into a leading webcast and streaming media solutions provider with a global presence delivering value to enterprise, healthcare and publishing customers.

Before ON24, Peter was corporate controller at Wired Ventures, Inc., the multimedia print and on-line publishing holding company and parent to Wired Magazine and the Wired "wired.com" digital divisions. Here, he was responsible for all divisional and corporate consolidation financial and accounting functions

Previously, Peter held a number of finance-related positions including director of finance and administration at the human resources and payroll specialists Ceridian / Tesseract Corporation and manager, financial reporting & analysis at engineering consulting services provider, ABB-CE / Impell Corporation.

Peter holds an MBA in finance from the University of San Francisco and a BA in finance from Nijenrode -The Netherlands School of Business, Breukelen, The Netherlands.

Chris Seth
Managing Director, Europe

Chris is responsible for the UK and expansion into Europe. Piczo, a social networking site for teenagers worldwide, attracts 10 million unique visitors each month. With over 16 years of managerial experience in digital media and advertising, his career has flourished within the fields of interactive businesses, communications, new media and publishing.

Most recently, Chris was managing director for Richmond Events, which runs strategic business forums across the globe. He was responsible for the UK and European division

Prior to Richmond Events, Chris was media director at BBDO's digital agency Proximity, the first UK agency to integrate interactive, direct and promotional services. While there, he contributed to income growth of over 300% through local and global pitch wins including Emirates, Shell, FT and Save the Children.

Before Proximity, Chris was regional director of the International Herald Tribune, and was responsible for the newspaper's performance in Europe.

Additionally, Chris spent five years in the publishing industry as European sales manager for Time Out magazine. Chris was solely responsible for establishing new companies in Paris and Madrid and also expanded the publishing group with the launch of nine titles

Chris is a graduate of Southampton University and holds a joint honours degree in French and Spanish.

Piczo Board of Directors

Jeremy Verba, CEO

Jim Conning, Founder and VP, Products

Paul Matteucci, US Venture Partners

Jed Smith, Catamount Ventures

Mark Fernandes, Sierra Ventures