Kurt Abrahamson, CEO
Kurt leads the SocialMedia.com team and ensures that we execute to our goals.
Seth Goldstein, Co-Founder & Chairman
Seth drives the SocialMedia.com Advertising Vision and is keeper of our values.
Dave Gentzel, Co-Founder & VP Products
Dave invents products that capitalize on social media
Gedioen Aloula, EVP & General Manager
Gedioen espouses SocialMedia.com’s benefits to consumer brands and social media publishers.
John A. De Goes VP Engineering
John leads the SocialMedia.com engineering team, providing the direction needed to keep up with the unrelenting demands of our fast-growing marketplace
James Kelly handles all things finance. He is an experienced professional in the online advertising space.
SocialMedia.com’s talent is comprised of people with backgrounds in online advertising, social media, and technology industries. The team is bound by a passion to invent new ways of making advertising more effective within social media.
Kurt Abrahamson is CEO of SocialMedia.com. Kurt has an accomplished history of growing and leading successful businesses and his experience working with the web’s leading publishers gives him the ability to understand the complex needs of media companies.
Kurt came to SocialMedia.com from Google where he first served as Director of the Content Media Group, leading the global launch of Google AdSense. Kurt managed the direct sales channel for publishers and secured long-term deals with five of the top ten web properties. He also served as the Director of Global Sales & Operations Strategy and as Director of Sales Operations for North America.
Prior to working at Google, Kurt served as COO of Jupiter Communications and President of Jupiter Media Metrix from 1994 to 2003. He helped build Jupiter’s business from a 12-person office to one of the leading Internet research organizations, with over 520 employees worldwide. He grew and guided the sales team to secure over 40% market share, establishing Jupiter’s position as one of the leading sources of Internet research.
Seth Goldstein, Co-Founder & Chairman
Seth Goldstein is the co-founder and Chairman of SocialMedia.com. Seth has extensive leadership experience, advising advertisers on the evolving opportunities in social media, while encouraging developer creation of lasting and interactive applications for online consumers.
An experienced entrepreneur, Seth has created a number of successful Internet businesses, including one of the first Internet advertising companies, SiteSpecific, in 1995. Seth was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Flatiron Partners from 1998 to 2000. In 2002, he co-founded Majestic Research, a next generation Wall Street research firm that provides leading hedge funds with proprietary data insights. Majestic Research was founded on the premise that vigilant analysis of online behavior would lead to better investment research. In 2005, he created Root Markets, the first financial exchange marketplace for Internet mortgage leads.
Seth is also an angel advisor to a number of Web services companies including Aggregate Knowledge, Lijit and Downfly. He was the first investor in Web 2.0 pioneer del.icio.us (now part of Yahoo!).
In addition to Seth’s entrepreneurial efforts, he is also an active member on the speaking circuit, considered the de facto expert on social media. Providing insight for both advertisers and developers, Seth is often asked for his thoughts on best practices, emerging trends and the future of the social media landscape. He contributed his expertise to articles in the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek, offering the inside scoop on monetizing social media, connecting advertisers with developers and the importance of social network applications as part of multi-channel advertising campaigns.
Dave Gentzel, Co-Founder and VP Products
Dave Gentzel is co-founder and vice president of product development of SocialMedia.com. Building compelling Web applications for over 10 years, Dave is the resident expert on what makes a successful social media application. Dave developed the extremely popular Facebook applications FoodFight and HappyHour, which have each attracted over three million users. Dave oversees and guides the strategic and creative product development at SocialMedia.com.
In 2006, Dave’s creation of the widget Trakzor for MySpace, which enables users to monitor visitors to their profile pages, attracted 3.5 millions users and 40 million pageviews per month. Dave was immediately brought on board at SocialMedia Networks when the Facebook platform opened to developers, and continues to educate developers on how to make the most successful applications for advertisers.
True to his entrepreneurial spirit, Dave has been actively building online business ventures since the age of 15. In 1998, he launched the Trintium Gaming Network, a Web hosting and advertising agency serving video game and entertainment Web sites, which delivered over 100 million hits to fans worldwide.
Dave graduated summa cum laude from at Virginia Tech with a B.S. in business information technology.
Gedioen Aloula, EVP & General Manager
Gedioen Aloula is Executive Vice President and General Manager at SocialMedia.com. He joined SocialMedia.com to drive the company’s thinking on how brands were going to think about social advertising. He is responsible for communicating the benefits of the company and its products to consumer brands and social media publishers.
Gedioen was previously a brand manager with Procter and Gamble, where he spent five years, most recently managing the Old Spice Body Wash business.
Gedioen’s achievements include two Effie Awards in 2009 and a Cannes Lion 2008 Silver Award. He graduated from Stanford with a degree in Economics.
John A. De Goes, VP of Engineering
John A. De Goes is vice president of engineering at SocialMedia.com. John officially joined the team at the close of 2009, and now directs his passion, energy, and 20 years of experience towards building the world’s premier platform for social advertising.
Fluent in dozens of computer programming languages, hundreds of technologies, and multiple development methodologies, John’s diverse work experience includes authoring books on 3D game programming, writing more than a million lines of code throughout his career, co-founding several successful startups, speaking at conferences on agile development, and managing dispersed teams of developers across multiple projects. His formal background is in applied mathematics, which he has leveraged to invent novel algorithms, ranging from peer-to-peer real-time content merging to reconstruction of 3D shapes from 2D stills.
John comes to SocialMedia.com from N-brain, where he led a team of senior engineers to develop a massively-distributed, 400,000 line of code product that introduced the world to real-time collaboration before Google Wave.
John tweets and blogs as time allows, on technology, software development, social media, and agile/lean development.
James Kelly, VP Finance
James Kelly is responsible for all aspects of the finance and accounting function at SocialMedia.com. He is an experienced professional in the online advertising space.
Prior to his work at SocialMedia.com, James was the CFO at Skyrider, a development stage startup focused on monetizing P2P networks. Prior to Skyrider, James served for six years at Cisco Systems on teams responsible for M&A, Strategic Planning and Tech Group Finance. Prior to Cisco, James served for four years at Deloitte & Touche in their audit practice, where he earned his CPA. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from University of California, Los Angeles.