Richard French
Richard defines the company's direction for growth. Because of his wide-ranging experience working with multinational companies as well as startups, Richard blends an entrepreneurial spirit with the ability to mine the efficiency of larger organizations. It is this fusion of technical expertise with business savvy that is Richard's professional hallmark.

Most recently, Richard ran the Open Source Development Network at VA Software Corporation/OSDN. At OSDN (now OSTG), he brought together 11 disparate Internet properties, including such notables as Slashdot, Sourceforge.net, and Thinkgeek, forming a cohesive whole. The resulting concern became the de facto network for open source news and downloads.

Under his leadership, OSDN became one of the top ten Internet media sources for technology news, community collaboration, and shopping, with 220M page views by 15M unique visitors per month. In three years, Richard turned an annual $11M loss on $12M sales into a $2.5M profit on $24M sales.

Richard's large company experience came from his roles at Oracle and Groupe Bull. During his tenure at Oracle, he led the Enterprise Platform Division with revenues of $1.8B.

To give back to the industry that inspires him, Richard blogs on a series of business and technology issues at www.richardfrench.net. Richard holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Canada.