The VidDrop Team
Passionate. Dedicated. Motivated. Innovative.
The VidDrop team is there to ensure you have a fantastic experience with our product and our business.
Co-Founder,
CEO & Marketing:
Danielle Erica Center
Danielle has over 18 years of marketing and technology experience. Danielle has helped build brands, both large and small. She is a sought-after speaker and spoke at the “Women in Tech” event in 2016 and Digital LA’s “Silicon Beach Fest” in 2016. She is a UCLA graduate and also during college, she attended the Semester at Sea Program which took her by ship to 12 different countries including India, Israel, Russia, and China. Danielle has worked for brands such as Yahoo, Realtor.com, Move.com, Africa.com, and Genealogy.com. She has also been a technology contractor for the U.S.A. Department of Defense at the Tripler Army Medical Base in Oahu, Hawaii alongside Booz Allen Hamilton technology contractors. While at Yahoo she was in charge of a database of over 16 million email addresses. She is an expert in video marketing, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and marketing automation. She has a certificate in Entrepreneurship from Harvard Business School.
In her free time, she enjoys cooking some of the best vegetarian dishes on the planet and going for long walks. She actively cultivates a relationship with the divine through attending her church St.Nicholas a Greek Orthodox Church and i.church, following discoveringthejewishjesus.com and through a meditation practice with Oprah & Deepak Chopra’s meditation experience app.
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Favorite Quote: “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.” – Aristotle 384 BC to 322 BC
CTO:
Taneli Otala
Taneli is a is hands-on technologist and inventor at heart. He has a long history in CTO and VP Engineering roles, including founding one company. He was the former CTO of MySQL which was later acquired by Sun Microsystems/Oracle for $1 billion. He was CTO of AtomicLabs/CloudMeter acquired by Splunk for $100 million. In addition, he was a Senior Director at Oracle. Has scaled systems to 100 million users. He has expertise in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cloud architectures. He has a patent for asynchronous parallel processing of log data. He has managed all aspects of technology in his 30+ years of technology experience, and yet a day doesn't go by, without him coding.
Co-Founder,
Sales & Operations:
Ryan Bonelli
His is a co-founder of and former CEO of MonsterGardens.com. He helped grow MonsterGardens.com from a small e-bay business from his garage to a company that did almost $5 million dollars in revenue in 2015 & 2016. He has a varied background in marketing, sales, finance, and operations. With Ryan on the team, we can look forward to a solid product roadmap and a product that delights our consumers and business customers alike. Ryan is an expert in digital video marketing. He was key in building the MonsterGardens.com YouTube channel to as many as 14 million views and over 300 different product and informational videos. Ryan worked for over 10 years in mortgage loan production and when he left American Brokers Conduit he had helped grow the monthly volume of funded transactions to over $250 million.
Product Manager
Jason Folk
Jason has been working in high-tech for 20 years, and in Product Management and in e-commerce for over a decade, at such companies as eBay, NexTag, Wish.com, Walmart.com, and PingPong Financial. While at Walmart e-commerce delivered $3M+ in revenue from an initial $1M+ seed-fund, beating forecasts and closed $0.25M in 2 months (Disney & Universal). At eBay he increased sales 1.5%+ vs. baseline (US Search Team) equally $20M annually. Jason brings a unique focus on product development and building an amazing product that our customers love and find "mission-critical."
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He lives in the SF Bay Area with his family, and enjoying hiking, competitive running, and swimming.
Chief Revenue Officer
Sales
Ned Sands
Ned has 30 years of experience in VP-level sales roles, with a heavy focus on ad sales for media companies & TV. He has worked for brands like Viki/Rakuten, MTV, Live Nation, NBC/Universal TV, and Bravo TV Channel. Ned worked at Bravo as one of the first Ad Sales team members and help put Bravo TV on the map with major Advertisers. There he grew ad sales from 0 to over $100 million. Bravo was then acquired by NBC/Universal.
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He lives in the Westlake Village area of Los Angeles and is excited to build a large Ad Sales Organization for VidDrop.
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Chief Financial Officer/Advisor
Deanna Farnell
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Deanna is a licensed CPA with 25 years of experience growing companies from the ground up. Working mostly in the tech start-ups, real estate and government industries. She won the 2018 CFO of the Year Award - Small Business by the LA Business Journal. She was COO/CFO for CGI, a boutique real estate investment and strategy firm whose total assets were valued at $900 million. She is also a successful business owner of a holistic wellness center and entrepreneur.
In her spare time, she enjoys yoga and a good specialty holistic tea. She lives in Southern California.
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Product Manager
Ashwin Kumar
Ashwin is a tech enthusiast and programmer turned product manager, having worked in Amazon, Fuji Xerox, and several startups. He has helped bring products from an idea to reality with experience in App development, Cloud-based SaaS Platforms and tools, and System development. He has a Masters in Computer Science from Washinton University in St. Louis with a focus on Machine Learning and A.I. His “Human-centered tech-driven design” approach for product development helps build products users not only love to use but want to use.
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In his free time, you can catch him trying to cook new recipes from youtube, playing soccer, or on the road exploring.
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Marketing Assistant
Sophie Kuester
Sophie is one of the marketing interns at VidDrop. She is currently enrolled at San Diego State University for her Bachelor’s in Psychology. Sophie previously worked at Binge Networks as a marketing intern where she managed the large company's social media and provided daily client support.
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She lives in Pacific Beach, San Diego, and enjoys walks on the beach, yoga, and cooking.
Strategy & Engineering
Nathan Briggs
Nathan is an engineering and strategy leader at Red Bull, Amex, ATT, and LifeLock. He has over 25 years of experience and has many technical certifications including AWS (Amazon Web Services). He is an expert in machine learning and artificial intelligence. He has created several patent-pending technologies.
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Advisor
Jacques Derosena
Jacques is the Co-Founder of Triangle Road Entertainment. As a Film Producer, he has won many Awards and Co-Executive produced Films that were on the eligibility list by the Academy Awards. He has worked at Miramax Films, Dimension Films, and Granada Entertainment.
As a Tech/Marketing support, he has worked at Martek Global and PeopleSoft. He also worked as a Commercial Properties Account Executive at CBRE New York. He is a graduate of Capitol Technology University with a Bachelor of Science in Software and Internet Applications. He has a certificate in Entrepreneurship from Harvard Business School.
Advisor
Jonathan Shroyer
He is a passionate, high-energy, collaborative, and innovative customer success CEO with 20+ years’ experience in leading and guiding “Best in Class” SaaS teams. As a Co-Founder of Officium Labs he firmly believes customers are the heart of every company. They are the folks who pump blood to all the organs and enable a company to exist and deliver value. The longevity of a company is, therefore, directly tied to its customer success—to how well it takes care of its heart.
After many years at the executive table with Microsoft, Symantec, Postmates, Kabam, and Autodesk. He branched out and built Officium Labs on the concept of decentralization and distributed teams are the future of service. He sees amazing potential for VidDrop not only to help his company, but hundreds others around the world.
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Advisor
Iddo Tal
Iddo is a consummate entrepreneur who founded invi Labs in 2012 and sold it to Google in 2018. invi Message was a fully-featured smart messaging app that replaces the default texting app on Android. He then went on to be a Product Manager at Google. He has also been a speaker and mentor at Google Launchpad and Standford University's Cardinal Ventures. He started his career at E&Y and Intel.
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Iddo has practical advice to help VidDrop scale to millions of happy customers.
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