Management
Team

The experienced management team at Marin is dedicated to fostering an environment of mutual respect among team members that rewards hard work and initiative.

Management

Chris Lien

Founder and CEO

Chris is responsible for Marin’s overall strategic direction and execution. Chris founded Marin in 2006 and shortly thereafter invited Wister Walcott and Joe Chang to join him on the quest to develop an enterprise-class, online advertising management platform. Prior to Marin, Chris served as Chief Operating Officer of Adteractive, an online performance marketing company, from 2004 to 2005. In 2001, Chris co-founded Sugar Media, a broadband services platform, which was sold in 2003 to 2Wire, a leading supplier of DSL equipment and services, which was subsequently acquired by Pace plc in 2010. Prior to founding Sugar Media, Chris served in various capacities, including as Chief Financial Officer and acting Chief Executive Officer, of BlueLight.com, Kmart’s e-commerce and Internet service provider subsidiary. Prior to Bluelight.com, Chris spent 10 years executing merger and financing transactions at investment banks, including Morgan Stanley and Evercore Partners, with his last role as managing director. Chris graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Dartmouth College and earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

  • John Kaelle

    EVP and CFO

    John brings more than 20 years of finance, investment banking and accounting leadership experience to Marin. Prior to joining the Company, John spent six years as Vice President of Finance and Investor Relations at Shutterfly, Inc., an internet-based personal publishing service, from October 2004 to March 2011. Prior to Shutterfly, John spent four years at Thomas Weisel Partners as a Vice President in the mergers and acquisitions group where he provided advisory services to technology companies. John began his career at Coopers and Lybrand, where he was a manager in the firm’s audit and advisory practice, and subsequently served as an Assistant Vice President and Assistant Controller at TriNet Corporate Realty Trust, a publicly traded real estate investment trust. John holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Michigan, a Master’s Degree in Taxation from Golden Gate University and an MBA in Finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. John is also a certified public accountant (inactive) in the state of California.

  • Peter Wooster

    Chief Revenue Officer

    Peter has extensive on-demand technology sales experience. From October 2004 to December 2006 Peter served as vice president of sales for Angel Points Inc., a workforce management application provider. Prior to that, Peter served as a Strategic Account Executive at salesforce.com, a provider of cloud-based CRM solutions, from October 1999 to February 2004. At Paychex Corporation, an HR and payroll process software company, Peter served as an Account Executive for Major Markets from January 1994 to September 1999. Peter holds a B.A. in Specialized Studies from Ohio University.

  • Wister Walcott

    Co-founder and EVP, Products and Platform

    Wister is responsible for product management and professional services at Marin, which leverage his combined experience in designing, integrating, and deploying enterprise software. From 2004 to 2005, Wister was the Vice President of Marketing at Composite Software, an enterprise data integration software provider. Prior to that, Wister served as Senior Director of Product Management at Siebel Systems, a CRM software provider, from 1999 to 2004, when Oracle Corporation, an enterprise software company, acquired it. Prior to Siebel, from 1996 to 1999, Wister was the Vice President of Marketing at Pilot Network Services, Inc., an Internet security provider. From 1993 to 1995 and from 1988 to 1991, Wister worked at Oracle Corporation, where he held a variety of technical and management positions. Wister holds a B.S. In Computer Science (with honors) and an M.B.A. from Harvard University.

  • Joseph Chang

    Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer

    Joe leverages enterprise software experience with startup pragmatism in leading Marin’s engineering team. Joe served as Vice President of Information Systems at W.P. Carey, a publicly traded real estate investment firm, from April 2004 to June 2006. From November 2001 to April 2004, Joe served as Technical Architect at Mercer Consulting, a consulting firm. Prior to working at Mercer, Joe held a number of positions at Bluelight.com, jcrew.com and Trilogy Software. Joe is a graduate of Stanford University, with a B.S in Industrial Engineering and a minor in Computer Science.

  • Matt Ackley

    Chief Marketing Officer

    Over the past 9 years Matt has held leadership positions in the online marketing and advertising functions as both eBay and Google. As Vice President of Internet Marketing and Advertising at eBay, Matt led the design and the development of eBay’s online marketing, trading desk and publisher platforms and charted eBay’s course in the digital marketing ecosystem. Matt also worked at Google where he chased his dream of the unified stack as the product marketing lead for the Doubleclick, Google Analytics and Youtube Advertising platforms. Outside of work, Matt can be found on the golf course or in some random northern California city at a soccer tournament for one of his three girls. Matt graduated cum laude from Duke University School of Engineering, and earned an MBA from Harvard Graduate School of Business.

  • Nancy Kato

    Chief People Officer

    As Chief People Officer at Marin Software, Nancy is responsible for developing and managing all global processes and policies in regard to employee relations, talent acquisition, performance management, compensation, as well as employee and organizational development. Nancy joins Marin Software from TiVo, Inc., where she served as Senior Vice President of Human Resources from April 2006 to September 2012, and previously served as TiVo’s Vice President, Human Resources from January 2005 to April 2006. Prior to TiVo, she served as Vice President of Global Compensation at Hewlett Packard from January 2003 to January 2005. Nancy also served as the Senior Vice President of Human Resources for Ariba, from December 2000 to October 2002, and has also held senior roles at Compaq and Tandem. Nancy earned her B.A. in Health Sciences, and M.A. in Education and Counseling from San Jose State University.

  • Brian Marin

    Vice President, Global Services

    Brian leads the Client Services, Professional Services and Support Services teams responsible for deployment, integration, training and 24-hour technical support for Marin Software customers across the globe. Prior to joining Marin Software, Brian was a Senior Director at Performics (acquired by Publicis Groupe), with overall responsibility for EMEA and APAC. He has over 15 years of experience building and managing multi-disciplinary teams at Pipex Internet Africa (acquired by UUNET), ShopSmart (acquired by Barclaycard) and DoubleClick (acquired by Google). Brian is a graduate of the University of Cape Town with a degree in Commerce and Information Systems.

  • Sirous Wadia

    Vice President of Accounts

    In his role as Vice President of Accounts, Sirous oversees the Account Management and Client Services teams responsible for overall client adoption and satisfaction with Marin. During his tenure at Marin he has contributed to the company’s industry leading retention rate, which today exceeds 95%. Sirous brings to Marin extensive global marketing and sales expertise, most recently from VMWare, one of the fastest-growing software companies in history, where he managed strategic sales programs and training for enterprise-class global sales. Previously, he was a Global Partner Development Manager for Sun Microsystems, where he was a three-time recipient of Sun’s top performance award. Sirous holds an MBA from Santa Clara University and a BS in Psychobiology from UCLA.

  • Wesley MacLaggan

    Vice President, Products

    Wesley leads the product management team at Marin – where he is responsible for driving Marin's roadmap and working closely with engineering to deliver innovative advertising solutions to the market. He has almost a decade's experience developing and delivering analytical enterprise SaaS applications, including four years with Applied Predictive Technologies working on their platform to help retailers maximize the return on their promotional spending. Wesley began his career providing strategic guidance to companies in a range of industries with Mercer Management Consulting. He holds an economics degree from Dartmouth College.

  • Llewellyn Powers

    VP, Technical Operations

    Llew leads the Technical Operations team at Marin – who design and support the systems, network and database architecture on which the application runs. Llew has worked in systems operations for more than 15 years in the fields of financial software, online media and SaaS. Prior to Marin, he served as Director of IT Operations at Donnerwood Media, where he built the backing infrastructure for a media-rich virtual world & virtual economy. Llew also designed and implemented the underlying systems at Visible Path and Listen.com. Llew is a champion of lean ops methodology and modular, scalable systems design. Llew holds a BA from Columbia University.

  • Paul Emery

    Vice President, Engineering

    Paul Emery leads the engineering team at Marin Software. He brings more than 22 years of global software engineering and technology management experience in the enterprise software and financial services industries. Prior to Marin Software, Paul was the VP of Engineering at Mu Dynamics, the VP of Engineering and Technical Services at Visible Path, the VP of Server Technologies at Oracle, the VP of Engineering and Client Services at FaceTime Communications, and VP of Engineering at Vignette – where he led the successful product integration efforts of several of Vignette’s strategic acquisitions. Paul joined Vignette through its acquisition of enterprise portal pioneer Epicentric, where he was also the VP of Engineering. He holds an AB degree in physics from Harvard.

  • Russell Wirth

    Vice President, Sales

    As Vice President, Sales, Russell oversees both the brand direct and the agency sales teams responsible for signing new revenue in North America. Russell brings over 20 years experience ramping up growth and market penetration for mid-stage companies in new information, media and analytics segments. Most recently Russell was running sales at several SaaS companies including Overtone, a social media analytics solution and PopularMedia a viral marketing optimization platform. Previously, as Vice President of Sales at Coremetrics, Russell oversaw revenue growth for this Web Analytic leader from $4 to $45 million and an increase in customers from 100 to over 1,000 in a 4 year period. Earlier in his career, Russell also served as VP of Business Development at IRI Software, a Nielson competitor, and headed up Western Regional sales in Business Intelligence with Crystal Decisions. Russell graduated with honors from Colorado College with an degree in Business / Economics.

  • Andrew Zakem

    Global Vice President, Agency Sales

    Andrew oversees new sales of Marin’s platform to digital agencies. He’s a founding member of Marin’s sales organization and was responsible for Marin’s selection by many of the largest online advertisers and agencies. Andrew brings 15 years of senior sales experience to Marin and previously served as a naval officer leading Engineering and Combat Systems divisions in shipboard operations in the Red Sea, Northern Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. Andrew earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics with general engineering core curriculum from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

  • Cory Lund

    Vice President, Strategic Technologies

    Cory serves as the primary architect and vendor liaison for integrations between Marin and industry analytics and ad serving platforms such as DART, Atlas, Mediaplex, MediaMind, Coremetrics, ClearSaleing and Omniture. Cory works closely with Marin’s Global Services team to provide tools and product features to improve Marin’s end-to-end services experience. Prior to this role, Cory launched both Marin’s Client Services and Professional Services organizations, and provided executive oversight to Marin’s most strategic clients including MediaCom, iProspect, Performics, Hotels.com, TradeDoubler, Neo@Ogilvy, and Razorfish. Prior to joining Marin, Cory served as President of San Francisco-based Triadigm Technology, a technology firm focused on developing mission critical, SME (Small/Medium Enterprise) web solutions. Cory graduated from Northwestern University with honors in Engineering w/ specialization in Artificial Intelligence.

  • Rashmi Garde

    General Counsel

    Rashmi is responsible for Marin’s worldwide legal affairs and brings to Marin over 15 years of legal experience in both public and privately held companies. Prior to joining us in July 2011, Rashmi worked as an independent legal consultant from September 2010 until June 2011. Prior to that, Rashmi worked at VMware, Inc., an enterprise software company, since 2001, most recently serving as Vice President and General Counsel from September 2005 to September 2009. Prior to that, she was a senior attorney at Electronics for Imaging (EFI), a printing technology company. Rashmi began her practice as a corporate associate at Fenwick & West and later Graham and James. Rashmi holds a B.A. in Computer Science and a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.

  • Ed Stevenson

    Managing Director Global Agencies & International

    Ed serves as Managing Director Global Agencies & International. He brings over 10 years of senior management experience in rapidly developing online and media businesses to Marin, having most recently served as WPP’s GroupM Director of Search Operations. WPP is the world’s largest buyer of search and GroupM is their digital division. Prior to that position, Ed helped build and then ran the UK search business of 24/7 Real Media which WPP purchased in May 2007 for approximately $650 million. In that role he was tasked with establishing sales channels and generating new leads for its Search business unit. Ed helped position 24/7 Real Media as a global full-service search marketing agency and was instrumental in new product developments and taking sales processes to a global level. Before joining 24/7 Real Media, Ed had had commercial roles in several companies such as Nomadic Display.

  • Jon Myers

    VP, Managing Director – EMEA

    Jon is responsible for delivery of the Marin Software platform to EMEA agencies and advertisers including iProspect, LBI, Neo@Ogilvy, Betfair, Littlewoods and Hotels.com. This gives him a unique insight into online advertising trends within both agencies and brands. Prior to joining Marin Software Jon was leading Yahoo’s search and display account management teams. Myers joined Yahoo after 12 years on the search and digital marketing agency side as a Director at both MediaVest and Latitude. Jon is recognised for his experience and thought leadership within the European online advertising industry as a regular speaker and moderator at conferences worldwide. He also sits on the Global Search Engine Strategies (SES) Advisory Board and regularly contributes his opinions to trade press as well as industry bodies such as SEMPO, IPA and the IAB.

  • Tim Collin

    Vice President of Sales, EMEA

    Tim leads Marin's local sales efforts in territories across EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa). With over 20 years experience leading international sales teams at fast growing SaaS technology companies – including a number of US companies looking to expand their presence in Europe - Tim brings with him a wealth of knowledge. Prior to joining Marin, Tim worked as the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Blackboard Inc., where he more than doubled the size of the EMEA business. He has also held senior sales roles working for Connexion2 Ltd., Media 100 Inc., Radius Inc. and Xerox.