- Campaigns:
- 1BOG.org
- |
- greenoptions.com
- |
- carrotmob.org
- |
- lendmesomesugar.com
Steve is the CEO and Chairman of the Board of Virgance, the Chairman of the Board for each company Virgance builds and is the acting Chairman of Serious Business. Steve also serves as the 2nd Vice Chair on the Board of Directors of the Presidio Graduate School. He is a successful serial entrepreneur who has been involved in building 6 companies prior to Virgance, resulting in over $3 billion in market value. Most recently, Steve co-founded Powerset, a natural language search engine company, which was acquired by Microsoft for $100 million dollars in 2008 and served on the Board of Directors at Jaxtr a voice over IP company which was acquired by Sabse. Before Powerset and Jaxtr, Steve also co-founded or created Promptu Mobil (private) and Loudfire (now Nokia), was an executive at Proxicom (now iCrossing) and AGS (now Statoil) and was the editor of "The Entrepreneur's Workbook".
Steve is often selected as a keynote speaker on a variety of issues ranging from social networking to the future of sustainability.
Naseem leads Virgance's extraordinary engineering team.
Prior to Virgance, Naseem spent three years at PayPal, where he had roles as an engineer, architect and manager. While at PayPal, he architected and patented a new authentication system, and designed the PayPal Plugin, before moving on to start and manage the Financial Products team, which consisted of PayPal's credit and debit businesses. He found his passion in the 0-60 stage of building products and teams from scratch and scaling them, and quickly built Financial Products up to an international development team across three locations.
After leaving PayPal, Naseem was the first employee at one of the top Facebook application companies, before starting his own ventures in the social networking space.
Naseem holds B.S. and M.S. degrees, both from Stanford University.
Brent is the mastermind behind Carrotmob, the new method of consumer activism that has turned into an international phenomena. Frustration with the ineffectiveness of traditional methods of activism spurred him to create Carrotmob and co-found Virgance.
Before Carrotmob, Brent worked for The Go Game, designing hilarious games and producing elaborate, customized events for his clients around the world. In addition, Brent has directed a documentary film about criminal justice issues.
Brent works on making the activism projects at Virgance as effective as possible. He draws on his experience toiling away at less-effective methods of activism, including founding a criminal justice advocacy organization at Stanford, speaking at rallies, helping organize a team of anti-war protesters, and briefly raising money for an environmental non-profit. He has also been an organizer during several political campaigns.
Brent is a graduate of Stanford University.
Rahul is Head of Business Development & Marketing at Virgance. Prior to Virgance, Rahul was part of the early team at Spock where he served as Vice President and directed all marketing and operations. Spock was successfully acquired by Intellius in 2009.
Rahul is a Co-Founder of the Full Circle Fund's Energy Impact Circle, an alliance of emerging business leaders who help solve public problems through engaged philanthropy and public policy advocacy; and a Co-Founder of The Clean Economy Network, the national advocacy association for the clean technology and green business community. Rahul serves on the Board of Directors at The Junior Statesmen Foundation and sits on Public Policy Committee for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. Rahul was appointed to the Mission Bay Citizens Advisory Committee in 2009 by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Rahul serves as an advisor to several prominent elected officials across the country on energy and technology policy. Rahul is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
Dave is a co-founder of One Block Off the Grid and is actively involved with the San Francisco community and governmental initiatives concerning renewable energy. Prior to founding One Block Off the Grid, he founded solarpowerrocks.com, a reputable source for solar industry information. He also worked as a solar specialist for a local solar company where he was involved with the back end side of solar system integrations. He managed every aspect from site assessment, to designing solar energy systems, to educating customers on how they operate. His knowledge of state specific incentive structures, energy policy, and solar installation hands-on experience are essential in the expansion of 1BOG. Dave is responsible for the development and implementation of 1BOG campaigns nationwide.
Dave is also pioneering the model for getting solar on renters in San Francisco by working with specialists in both tenant law and tax law. As a result, he hopes to be able to bring solar to renters across the country. Dave is a graduate in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois. He likes to play a game or two of poker, and he dreams of making the final table in the World Series.
Clayton B. Cornell is the General Manager for GO Media. He was formerly the Managing Editor and director of social media strategy for the blog network before it became part of Virgance. Clayton gained most of his social media and Web 2.0 experience during his time as a professional blogger and Lead Writer for Gas 2.0, GO Media's blog covering the future of sustainable transportation, and he's been covering biofuels and green car technology for GreenOptions.com since the beginning of 2007. Before GO, Clayton ran the training program for one of the EPA's largest public toxicology information libraries at Oregon State University, which was fulfilled under a $2-million Federal grant. He became a biodiesel enthusiast after experimenting with small-scale biodiesel production in OSU's chemical engineering lab, and has extensive hands-on experience with diesel cars and trucks, including the practical use of biodiesel and straight-vegetable-oil (SVO) as alternative fuels. Clayton graduated from the University of Utah with honors, receiving a degree in Biology and Chemistry. On the side, Clayton likes to spend his time at the beach or in the mountains. He's been a professional river-guide, amateur beer judge, and resident of some interesting, far-off places.
After spending 7 years traveling the wastelands of consulting, contracting and one of his own hair-brained startups, Aaron joined Virgance. He's passionate about hand-crafted XHTML, CSS and javascript as well as stunning, easy to use designs. He's been a part of Virgance since the early days when the company was eating lots of Ramen and borrowing desks from investment bankers. These days he spends his free time thinking up the next big Virgance campaign and cursing Internet Explorer 6. At work, he's involved in all of Virgance's flagship projects, as well as other up and coming Virgance products such as [TOP SECRET - REDACTED]
After graduating from Stanford with a degree in History and a minor in Italian language, Brad spent his first year out of school working as the Summer Staff Director for Stanford Sierra Camp. Having developed significant experience in managing community and business in college and beyond, Brad is excited about bringing his knowledge and enthusiasm to the business world. He hopes to play an important role in 1BOG and Virgance for the foreseeable future, learning as much as possible about how to successfully grow a business, then eventually continue on to pursue a graduate degree in business. When he's not in the office, on his BlackBerry, or writing emails on the train, he enjoys playing beach volleyball and obsessing about professional European soccer.
Grant joined Virgance after 2 years at VMware, where he made computers run inside computers. Now he makes computers run projects that create positive social change. The latter is slightly easier to explain, and he likes that. Grant studied computer science at Stanford and came darn close to a music minor. When he isn't wielding regular expressions like swords of glory, he sings, tinkers with electronics, jockeys discs, communes with Nature, and participates in Burning Man.
Kalvin grew up in the Bay Area, studied Computer Science at Stanford, and is interested in scalable social change, the Internet, and startups. Virgance is a strange fruit that claims all three, making it confusingly crunchy on the outside and fascinatingly juicy on the inside. Prior to Virgance, Kalvin worked at Hewlett-Packard and at startups with 48, 4, and 2 people.
Online, you can find him on Hacker News, reading Slate, or hunting deals. IRL, Kalvin plays tennis, board games, and fixes things that aren't broken. His favorite bloggers are Ezra Klein and Nate Silver; his favorite voices are Joel Stein and Michael Kinsley. He finds Yelp immensely useful and would like to thank his family and sister, who's going off to a great college soon. Lastly, Kalvin greatly enjoys working at places that allow bios last seen in high school theater programs.
Prior to One Block Off the Grid, Matt worked with the inside sales team at SunRun introducing residential PPAs to California and beyond. He also recruited for the medical device industry, was a music promoter and the editor of a student newspaper. A Milwaukee native, Matt has called San Francisco his home for over 3 years. An avid surfer, sailor and Ocean Beach enthusiast, Matt is excited about helping you go solar and doing his part to help build a new sustainable economy.
Tibet was born and raised in hippie-ville western Massachusetts, studied Computer Science at Brown University and then spent the next 5 years in Brooklyn and Providence, RI trying to get two different software startups off the ground. While both ended up flaming out before achieving orbit, he feels supremely fortunate that their trajectory landed him in San Francisco and eventually at Virgance. His previous work includes developing vehicle tracking and dispatching software at East Transit Technologies, and leading engineering efforts for Fusecal.com.
While primarily a master of all things web development, Virgance has already pushed Tibet to flex his Keynote skills, and become an expert on Facebook game mechanics and social media marketing, working on the Lend Me Some Sugar team. No matter what the task though, he is incredibly excited to be working on projects he feels passionate about and looks forward to helping change the world for the better. In the meantime Tibet spends his spare cycles exploring his new home in the bay by foot, bike and rollerskate, cooking up tasty vegetarian food, camping, hiking and looking for a bar with a good foosball table.
Before joining the 1BOG team at Virgance, Avra was working in New Orleans on policy and funding for post-Katrina redevelopment. She created a $40 Million program for the State Office of Community Development that was then adopted as a key pillar of recovery for the City of New Orleans. Prior to moving to Louisiana, Avra worked for the New York City Housing Preservation and Development as a project manager for affordable housing and mixed income developments. She is a native Californian and happy to be back in San Francisco working for Virgance. Avra graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Urban Studies and a minor in Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Cameron moved to San Francisco about five years ago after finishing studying in Continental Philosophy and Russian Studies in Atlanta. He's always been interested in and involved with non-profits and organizing, and is happy to apply this passion to disseminating solar information and assisting with group purchases on the 1BOG team. He's very excited to help you move forward with solar, so give him a call!
Jonathan is a community organizer reaching out directly to the people to spread solar energy knowledge into our communities through 1BOG. Educated in a variety of artistic mediums in several countries after a Literature and Language Arts degree from the University of Michigan, Jonathan is committed to the artful generation of new mediums to connect people with the heart of our common humanity to inspire and empower us all to collaborate to create thriving communities and ecosystems and to protect biodiversity as integrated extensions and reflections of our greatest selves. He is now starting to teach Virgance office yoga classes in South Park - Join us!
Kanyi joins the 1BOG team at Virgance from Las Vegas, NV, where he served as Regional Field Organizer for Obama's Campaign For Change. Tasked with breaking voter registration and turnout goals in a once highly-underrepresented district, he organized volunteers and supporters to break the pattern of apathy, and engage in community-building and empowerment. Before working for the campaign, Kanyi worked in business development and marketing at Doostang, an online job resource in Palo Alto, CA where he currently serves as advisor. Kanyi studied Philosophy at Stanford, where he won the Community Writing and Rhetoric award for his investigative work on Domestic Abuse in Santa Clara County, sang a cappella, and participated in the drama program. Kanyi enjoys reading, hip-hop, writing, soccer, learning about his family, squash, electronic music, languages, South Africa, the opera, disruptive technology, and the thought that we need to save ourselves from ourselves. He's pretty undecided about that last one, and mostly likes the way it sounds.
Lara has been thinking green her whole life since she was on the recycling team in 2nd grade coveting her own personal copy of 50 Simple Things Kids can do to Save the Earth. But as a recently unemployed history teacher she found her calling to no longer teach history, but be a part of it. With her growing interest in renewable energy she started at One Block Off the Grid in February 2009 after interning at Greenpeace and Greenhome.com and eventually began using her teachings skills to help 1BOG participants understand solar energy.
Natasha Mooney is a member of the Business Development and Marketing team at Virgance. Natasha received her B.A. in Urban Studies in 2008 from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was involved in environmental advocacy and building curriculum based community service programs. She is also an alumna of the International Honors Program, during which she conducted comparative research in urban development in Buenos Aires, Beijing, and Bangalore. She serves on the board of the One Percent Foundation, as well as the Full Circle Fund's Global Economic Opportunity Circle. She enjoys traveling, and is interested in the spatial challenges facing mega-cities in the developing world. Originally from Philadelphia, Natasha currently lives in the Mission District of San Francisco.
