Management

Khris Loux
CEO & Co-Founder @khris

Khris Loux has a strong 15-year track record of achievement in the software industry, specializing in negotiations and business development. As CEO and Co-Founder of Echo, he leads the company's strategic positioning and operational initiatives to ensure a culture of rapid innovation and success. A successful entrepreneur, Khris is also co-author of the Synaptic Web and Backplane Protocol, a proposed open standard that enables disparate javascript applications on a page to communicate seamlessly with each other, in real-time. Prior to founding Echo, Khris founded security software firm, Securix, which was acquired by RSA Data Securities for $115M. A sought after speaker at industry events, Khris has spoken at dozens of marketing and technology conferences including The Next Web, OMMA Global 2012, Social TV Summit, SXSW and Web 2.0.

Khris has a Bachelor of Science degree with a double major in Economics and Finance, and a minor in Computer Science, from Mount Saint Mary's College in Maryland.

Lev Walkin
CTO & Co-Founder @levwalkin

With over 15 years of experience in software development and systems administration, Lev designs and develops high performance, special purpose network-oriented software for IP-based networks, specializing in in network security, cryptographic applications, protocols and secure programming practices. Lev founded the Practice of Functional Programming Journal (PFP), which is an online peer-reviewed magazine popularizing a functional programming approach in software development with a current audience of over 10,000 Russian-speaking software professionals. Prior to joining Echo, Lev was an ASA platform developer at Cisco, where he developed hardware abstraction and POSIX-like threading, file system implementations and general portability layer for a proprietary operating system. Lev has previously held software development and systems administrations positions for Netli, Ulyanovsk GSM and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

Chris Saad
Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder @chrissaad

Chris brings over 10 years of entrepreneurial excellence to Echo, having founded over 7 workgroups, non-profits and start-ups over the last 14 years. Most recently, Chris co-founded the Data Portability project, an initiative supported by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, MySpace and Plaxo that enables web users' identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data to be discovered and shared between chosen tools or vendors. Chris also co-founded the APML (Attention Profiling Markup Langauge) Workgroup, promoting an open format for describing a user's ranked interests for 'Attention Aware' applications. Chris has also co-founded the Media 2.0 Workgroup, Faraday Media, RedShift and Radioactive, where he set strategic direction and championed the advancement of the real-time social web.

Chris' role at Echo is to track trends in the marketplace, listen to and participate in the community and translate those needs into actionable product direction.

Philippe Cailloux
COO @beingphilippe

Philippe brings over 15 years of product design and management leadership to Echo where he drives the company's operational focus. Philippe's previous tenures include Principal Designer and Manager of the Product Design Group at Adobe, Director Product Design at Roxio, VP Product Design and Product Management at FilmLoop, and consulting for several successful Internet startups.

Philippe has trained many User Experience professionals and served as Vice-Chair of Interaction Design for the Industrial Design Society of America. Philippe is also an avid photographer and serves as co-president of "the best little Camera Club in Palo Alto".

Bruce Ableson
VP of Client Solutions @bruceableson

Bruce Ableson leads Echo’s client services and solutions teams to ensure that they receive optimal support from their Echo investment. Bruce brings over 20 years experience in the software and online industries to his position. Most recently, Bruce served as the SVP of Client Services for KickApps, a provider of on-demand social media applications for large brands, agencies, and enterprises. In this position, Bruce headed a global sales engineering team working with clients in the Americas, Europe, and Asia/Pacific. Following KickApps' acquisition, Bruce led both pre-sales and post-sales implementation teams for KIT Digital.

Prior to KickApps, Bruce served as a management and systems consultant for clients including Verizon, AT&T, RJR Nabisco, Novartis, Allied-Signal, and Deloitte. As the founder and publisher of Open Diary, Bruce built the first system for blog comments, and also innovated the use of friend's list privacy settings and activity feeds in 1998. These features have led some to credit Bruce's site and inventions to be the beginnings of social media.

Ron Bouganim
VP of Corporate Development & Partnerships @ronboug

Ron Bouganim is a serial entrepreneur in the telecommunications and consumer Internet sectors, having co-founded or been a member of the senior management of startups including CCI (sold to British Telecom), Trymedia (sold to Macrovision), and Razz.

Ron has a deep understanding of how to develop ideas that start on a blank page into organizations that have far reaching scale. Before their respective acquisitions, CCI had 750 employees and was profitably generating $40M in top line revenues with operations in 10 countries from Mexico to Argentina. Trymedia provided outsourced commerce to over 1000 video game portals in the US and Europe generating over 300 million downloads from a catalog of 750 video game SKUs. Ron has raised over $300 Million in venture capital and vendor financing and completed 7 M&A transactions.

Ron has a Double Major in Accounting and International Business from McGill University, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude. He is married and has two children who will always be the startups he is proudest of.

Vlad Skvortsov
VP of Engineering @wadcom

Vlad has over 10 years of internet industry software development experience, working on the design and implementation of server-side applications on the UNIX platform. Vlad specializes is in information retrieval, statistics, high-performance and distributed systems.

Prior to joining Echo, Vlad was a member of Yahoo's highly acclaimed FlexForce (aka "Tiger") team providing professional software engineering services to groups all across the company. Previously, Vlad held senior engineering positions at Netli, which was acquired by Akamai, and Ulyanovsk State Technical University in their network operations center.

Kristin Hersant
VP of Marketing @kristinhersant

An interactive marketing veteran, Kristin Hersant has more than 15 years of experience managing successful integrated marketing programs to build brands, raise awareness and generate demand.

Most recently, Kristin served as the VP of corporate marketing for StrongMail where she successfully grew the company from a start-up to one of the top providers of interactive marketing solutions for email and social media in a crowded marketplace. Prior to StrongMail Kristin served as the global marketing communications manager for Mindjet, where she implemented innovative marketing programs and branding initiatives that helped increase global sales by 20 percent. Kristin's experience also spans key corporate marketing and creative services positions at L90, Better Brand Management, FeatureCast and Buzz Magazine. Hersant holds a BA in history from UCLA.