EXECUTIVE BIOS

 

Robert Alpert

CEO & Co-Founder

Mr. Alpert has executed more than fifty industrial start-ups and has completed a variety of successful business acquisitions, including several special situations involving the acquisition of undervalued assets. Mr. Alpert has developed a unique expertise in project development, project finance, and consolidation. His acquisitions included the tubular steel division assets of Babcock & Wilcox located in three states, including 6 million square feet of manufacturing facilities, the purchase of the entire aircraft and engine spare parts inventory from the bankruptcy estate of Eastern Air Lines, Inc., oil service equipment, raw materials and manufacturing equipment. He was an original founder Tubular Corporation of America, Inc., Interlock Technologies Corporation, Aviation Sales Corporation (an aviation parts distributor and maintenance, repair and overhaul company) and Republic Waste Services, Inc., which became Auto Nation and Republic Industries. As part of his merchant banking activities, he has been a principal and/or investor in other diverse, publicly owned enterprises including: PalEx (which became IFCO Systems), USA Waste (which became Waste Management) and other investments.

In 1997, Mr. Alpert acquired the assets of Kinetics.com and invested the assets in Land ‘N’ Sea Corporation, where he was the Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer. Land ‘N’ Sea Corporation developed the leading integrated marine channel for business-to-business, e-commerce and consumer marketing in the $23 billion recreational boating industry. Land ‘N’ Sea grew to become the largest source for marine parts and accessories and the industry's leading digital network for the cost-effective exchange of information, products and services and was acquired by Brunswick Corporation, the largest boat manufacturing and marine propulsion group in the world, in 2004.

Since 2005, as a result of his multi-industry background, he has elected to invest time and capital to mentor a handful of high growth companies either individually or in conjunction with other private equity investors.

 

  

Scott Hines

President & C0-Founder

Mr. Hines has over 20 years of experience in technology leadership, primarily serving the retail and manufacturing industries. He joins CopiaMobile from Vcommerce where he served as both Chief Operating Officer and Chief Marketing Officer. Mr. Hines led Vcommerce's development, client implementation and customer service initiatives.

Prior to Vcommerce, Mr. Hines was Senior Vice President of Global Store Systems & Chief Technology Officer at JDA Software, Inc. Mr. Hines' responsibilities at JDA included developing JDA's In-Store Systems and setting the technology direction for JDA's suite of products and advancing new technology ventures. In this role, Mr. Hines was responsible for setting the technology direction for systems used to manage inventory and optimize revenue for JDA's retail customers who collectively generate more than $500 billion in annual sales. While at JDA, Mr. Hines grew the product offering through both in-house product development as well as through managing over $100 million in acquisition activity.

Mr. Hines' success has earned him the 2002 Leader of the Year honors from AZsoft.net (now the Arizona Technology Council) as well as a two-time winner of a Microsoft Retail Application Developer (RAD) award and made him a regular on the retail speaking circuit. Previously, Mr. Hines was President of DataWorks, Inc. and Director of MIS for US Hosiery Corporation.

Mr. Hines holds a BS in Molecular Biology from Carnegie Mellon University.

 

Michael Chadwick

Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder

Mr. Chadwick has over 15 years of technology and business management experience, primarily focused on hyper growth and scalable enterprises. Mr. Chadwick joins CopiaMobile from GoDaddy.com, where he served as their Vice President of Technology and was the CTO of the technology business unit. Mr. Chadwick was responsible for the development of GoDaddy's core Internet presence products and GoDaddy's global IT operations. Mr. Chadwick led the development of GoDaddy's PKI product, which grew to over 25% market share over the course of four years and now is the #2 Certificate Authority in the world. Mr. Chadwick was responsible for building and growing GoDaddy's web hosting technology and business to #1 in the world. Under his technology leadership GoDaddy launched over 20 new products and scaled these products to millions of users and billions of requests per month. While leading GoDaddy's IT operations, Mr. Chadwick guided the company to a year over year reduction in IT budget. He did this while scaling and growing the business at a rapid rate internationally.

Prior to GoDaddy, Mr. Chadwick led the development of NCS Pearson's Internet initiatives, with a focus on web-based administrations and eLearning for school districts throughout the nation. In addition, he has written factory automation software for Motorola.

Mr. Chadwick holds a B.S. in Computer Science, with minors in Math and Psychology for the University of Arizona. He has two issued patents and over twenty patents pending.

 

Kristen Magnuson

Chief Financial Officer

During her 30 year career, Ms. Magnuson has provided business and financial leadership for a broad range of situations including high growth operations, international expansions, mergers and acquisitions, business model restructuring, integration management, offshore transition management and a variety of debt and equity transactions. Magnuson specializes in financial leadership, mergers & acquisitions and the subsequent integration to harvest cost synergies, raising capital, and change-management.

She has completed over forty successful business acquisitions and raised over $2 billion in capital. Prior to joining AZDF, Magnuson served as Chief Financial Officer of JDA Software for nearly twelve years. JDA is a publicly traded supply chain management software company that grew from $90 million in total revenues to nearly $400 million during Magnuson’s tenure. Before joining JDA Software, Magnuson held positions of increasing responsibility at Michaels Stores, Inc., MeraBank, A Federal Savings Bank and Arthur Young. Ms. Magnuson is currently the Audit Committee Chairman for Convio, Inc., a publicly traded SaaS company. Confidential and Proprietary

She holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Washington and is a CPA in Texas and Washington State.

 

Dan Clarke

Chief Marketing Officer

For over 20 years, Dan Clarke has been a strong force in the high-tech industry, building multi-million dollar companies and raising over $250 million from top-tier venture capital firms. Mr. Clarke is an EIR at AZ Digital Farm and Chief Marketing Officer of CopiaMobile. He also serves as CEO of portfolio companies NewsComm and Online Professor.

 

Prior to CopiaMobile and AZ Digital farm, Mr. Clarke was CEO of WinBuyer, a leading online advertising company serving large ecommerce retailers. Prior to WinBuyer, Mr. Clarke was CEO of Vcommerce (acquired by Channel Intelligence) processing billons of dollars in online transaction for large multichannel retailers. His operations expertise helped Vcommerce substantially increase its sales momentum, visibility, and overall performance growing to over $1.5 billion in retail value per year. Prior to joining Vcommerce, Mr. Clarke served as president, CEO and board member of Primarion (acquired by Infineon), a semiconductor company, which he founded in 1999.

Mr. Clarke spent 7 years at Intel, where he held several key positions including business unit general manager and marketing director of the Video Components, Mobil Computing and Graphics divisions. Clarke also served as the vice-president of sales and marketing at Three-Five Systems Inc., a NYSE public liquid crystal display company. Additionally, he was COO at Vivid Semi (acquired by National Semi) and serves on numerous Boards.