Chris Tacy

Buxton School

Wesleyan University

Board Member and Investor

Kilauea, Hawaii, United States

Mach49 helps Global 1000 companies develop a pipeline and portfolio of successful new ventures by Disrupting InsideOut™ — creating, building and launching new ventures generated from within their organizations — and Disrupting OutsideIn™ — designing and managing world-class corporate venture groups.

Mach49

Partner Corporate Investing and Board Member-in-Residence

Member Board Of Trustees

Inflect Health

Board Member

Helping Global 1000 companies learn how to better unlock internal innovation and entrepreneurship by creating new startup ventures.

Entrepreneur In Residence

As an independent consultant specializing in Innovation across Business, Corporate and Strategic Development, I am a problem-solver for-hire. I work with companies in the Technology, Investment and Financial Services, Defense, Healthcare, Design and Marketing Services, Lifestyle, Media and CPG market sectors to help them better take advantage of the opportunities available to them. I also currently provide analysis, insights, negotiation and diligence services and sourcing to a range of Private Equity investors, funds and corporate acquirers looking at potential transactions. I also provide a range of Corporate Development consulting services - including capitalization, spin-offs and carve-outs, mergers and acquisitions and IP transactions.

Twiceten Consulting

Principal

Worked as part of the five person Corporate Development group creating, sourcing, analyzing and negotiating new business opportunities, partnerships and strategies. Core deal team for Firefox Hello (Telefonica) and Mozilla's Search partnerships (Google, Yahoo, Yandex, etc) as well as numerous smaller partnerships and opportunities. Provided strategic development and initial BD for the Tiles advertising product. Developed a half dozen new diversified revenue stream offerings. Handled most all modeling on new opportunities for the company.

Problem solver, relationship developer, idea generator, model creator, deal closer, deck monkey, revenue chaser.

Mozilla Corporation

Principal - Corporate Development

Responsible for all communications, awareness marketing, thought-leadership, evangelism, lead-generation and go-to-market efforts, social media and content marketing for leading Cloud Technology start-up funded by First Round, Ignition and Madrona.

Grew AppFog Marketing team from 1 (just me) to a group of 4. The company won a huge range of awards in this time and saw sustained exponential growth - eventually becoming the #2 Public Cloud PaaS in the market.

Member of Executive Management Team.

Company acquired by CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL)

AppFog

Marketing

Biz Dev and Corp Dev for super bad ass start-up team building a distributed social layer for the web. Funded by First Round, 500 Startups, SoftTech and great angels. Managed all BD, Corp Dev and Sales efforts and was part of 3-person exec mgmt team.

Company acquired by private company Big Door Media.

OneTrueFan, Inc.

VP, Business Development

Contract corporate development consultant for Yves Behar's product and brand studio helping with developing non-traditional services-for-equity business models and service offerings.

Company acquired by Blue Focus Group, China's largest brand and PR consulting firm.

fuseproject

Corporate Development

Provided business, product, investment, strategy and management consulting to start-ups looking to become big; and big companies looking to become more like start-ups. Also provided business, organizational and growth strategy consulting for agencies and service businesses.

Board advisor and company advisor for start-ups.

Services provided range from innovation to change management to marketing strategy to internet strategy and direction to M&A and investment advising.

Clients and companies worked with and advised include NetApp, EPNW, ThoughtWorks, Hot Studio, 49th Parallel, Fullsack et al.

twiceten consulting

Principal, Strategy

Provided Strategy and Innovation leadership for boutique brand experience agency.

Responsible for development of and delivery of all Innovation practices and responsible for all Venture-related practices and efforts including development of a equity-for-services model for the business and an incubation offering as well.

Provided strategic advising and consulting services to executive stakeholders at clients and portfolio companies including boxee, Move Networks, CNN, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.
Directly responsible for high-level business development efforts in the internet, media and entertainment, consumer electronics and high tech market sectors. Provided Account Direction and strategic consulting to clients including Sun Microsystems, Microsoft Live and Move Networks.

Recruited into business by investors - worked through the eventual negotiated management buy-out.

Method

Chief Innovation Officer

Member of executive management team at boutique Portland, OR interactive agency.

Responsible for all Strategic direction and consulting for all of Pop Art's accounts. Directed the development of Interactive Marketing Strategies, Online Media Plans and ran all non-tactical consulting projects. Also served as Account Director on selected major accounts.

Responsible for the vast majority of new revenue generation for the company.

Turned the business around from a low-margin job shop to a high margin, value priced interactive agency with long-term retained large accounts.

Pop Art

Vice President, Strategic Services and Accounts

Advisor focused on product / market fit and customer acquisition.

Company acquired by Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX)

Coffee Equipment Company

Advisor

Responsible for all Retail Operations for America's leading artisan coffee roaster/retailer.

Company bought by TPG Capital.

Stumptown Coffee Roasters

General Manager, Retail

Consulting services centered around digital and interactive strategy, venture, entrepreneurship, innovation and general strategic consulting services.

Primary focus - agencies and services businesses.

Clients ranged from MDC Partners to Ghostdog Design to Espresso Parts NW.

Responsible for Corporate Strategy, particpated in the SWAT sales team and ran agency M&A activities at $2B publicly traded consulting services business.

Oversaw management of the Venture Strategy Group and was a General Partner and the Acting Managing Partner of Rare Ventures - Rare Medium's $350MM corporate venture group. Portfolio focus was social internet, distributed and P2P computing, ecommerce and digital media. Responsible for rationalizing the deal-flow, diligence and decision-making process and development of portfolio planning and strategy.

Member of Executive Management Team.

Rare Medium Group

Chief Strategy Officer

Managed the various US western region offices of publicly traded internet development and consulting company. Successfully integrated three acquired boutique agencies into the region.

Delivered the highest margins in the company. Created the Venture Strategy practice - providing consulting services to start-ups looking for strategy assistance and investment groups looking for diligence and deal-flow assistance.

Ran high level business development and executive relationship management.

Rare Medium, Inc

General Manager, Western Region

I was an Internet business, technology and culture columnist for New York Times Electronic Media writing a bi-weekly column for the Times website covering the Internet and technology and entrepreneurship issues.

<a href="http://partners.nytimes.com/library/cyber/under/indexunder.html">http://partners.nytimes.com/library/cyber/under/indexunder.html</a>

The New York Times

Columnist

Co-Founder and President of seminal Bay Area internet consulting boutique. Fire Engine Red was an elusive boutique consulting firm known for its reasuring expensiveness and excellent BBQ parties. Responsible for all business development, marketing, sales, corporate development and strategy.

Clients included such diverse companies as Sony, Planned Parenthood, Mayfield Fund, Sun, Accel Partners, Bigstep, Oracle, IDG Ventures, Nihilistic and Hitachi Data Systems. Fire Engine Red's primary areas of focus were Venture Strategy (funding strategy and pursuit, investment diligence, sector targeting and trend analysis) and high-scale distributed network technologies and development.

Company acquired by Rare Medium Group (NASDAQ: RRRR)

Fire Engine Red

President and Co-Founder

NVolve was the final, public face of the infamous Reality Factory think-tank. Intially started by IDG to help formulate Internet strategy and develop Internet products and services, as a result of the success of our Social Network Application Server product (and a proof-of-concept project called Arcadium), it was in the end spun off as a Mayfield-funded company which was then acquired by Viacom.

Along the way, Reality Factory / Nvolve developed systems and solutions for clients including Computerworld and CareerBuilder and made early strategic venture investments in companies including Architext (Excite) and Netscape. The returns from these investments provided initial capitalization for the formation of IDG Ventures.

As employee #1 of Reality Factory, I was responsible for all product and service development - all product management - and ran all investment diligence and decision-making. As part of management team, I worked to close NVolve's series A funding lead by Mayfield.

Company acquired by Viacom (NASDAQ: VIA).

NVolve

Vice President, Development

Developed and wrote the developer newsletter Off the 'Net for <a href="http://netscape.com">netscape.com</a>
Collaborated on both What's New and What's Cool for <a href="http://netscape.com">netscape.com</a> as well.

Netscape

Founded and ran early web development cooperative.

Developed or worked on the development of early websites including Internet Shopping Network, <a href="http://IDG.com">IDG.com</a> and CAIS.

Webworks

Founder

Responsible for very early web and online services efforts for IDG publication. Developed strategy and executed against it.