Andrea Michalek

Villanova University

Carnegie Mellon University

Technology and Product Leader

Dresher, Pennsylvania, United States

Fractional CTO / CPO. Executive coach. With a proven track record of successfully launching transformative products and businesses, Andrea assists her clients in achieving their goals.

Topular Strategy

President

Elsevier acquired Plum Analytics, the company I co-founded, in 2017.  My role at Elsevier was to lead research metrics product management. Working with the global teams, innovative metrics from Plum Analytics were successfully integrated across the suite of Elsevier products including Scopus, Science Direct, Mendeley, and Pure.

Elsevier

VP of Research Metrics, Product Management and Managing Director of Plum Analytics

EBSCO acquired Plum Analytics in 2017, and I served as the president of Plum Analytics. PlumX, the flagship product, was an analysis tool that measured the online impact of scholarly research. At EBSCO, this tool was sold globally into academic libraries, governmental agencies, funders, and commercial companies.

Responsible for all aspects of the Plum Analytics business unit: sales, marketing, business development, engineering, product management, and customer service. Integrated with shared services inside of the parent company for economies of scale.

EBSCO Information Services

President, Plum Analytics

Plum Analytics is the provider of PlumX™, a product that delivers a more complete picture of research and answers questions about research impact for anyone including researchers, librarians, administrators, and funders. PlumX, was named Library Journal’s most ambitious database in 2013.

Plum Analytics

Co-Founder and President

Led the technology behind Summon, a research search engine for libraries, from inception through to 250+ customers internationally.

Built and led an agile, international team of developers to architect a large scale content ingestion system and highly performant search engine for > 3/4 billion scholarly documents.

Summon won the 2011 CODiE Award for Best Enterprise Search Solution by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA).

More about Summon:

The Summon™ unified discovery service allows the researcher to quickly search, discover and access reliable and credible library content. It goes beyond federated search, beyond next-generation catalogs to create an all-new service for libraries. Through one simple search, it provides instant access to the breadth of authoritative content that's the hallmark of great libraries - digital and print, audio and video, single articles to entire e-journals, and every format in between.

Serials Solutions

Director of Technology, Discovery Services

- ProQuest and SerialsSolutions are listed separately in LinkedIn - so adding a second entry here.  See description above.)

ProQuest

Founded and ran a consulting company that helped growth companies execute on their ideas.

Assisted with the successful launch of dozens of startups - many with high scalability, high availability needs.

Core service offerings included:
-  Strategic Analysis
-  Project Leadership
-  Systems Architecture
-  Technology Due Diligence

Sample client engagements:
-  AccuWeather – Worked with executive management to set product requirements for a new line of business.  Formed and operated an outsourced product development team.
-  LinkStorm – Acted as interim CTO as company shifted from a publishing facing business model to an advertising platform.  Brought in a team to rearchitect key areas.
-  Lucky Litter – Re-architected ecommerce system and order processing for a direct-to-consumer ecommerce company.
-  Essembly / Facebook Causes – Provided technical oversight, mentoring, and project management to an entrepreneurial team of college-aged developers to get them to their public release.
-  TNS Media Intelligence – Performed technical due diligence for potential acquisition targets.
-  High Beam Research - Created an 18-month technology plan that streamlined and simplified the existing architecture for both their eCommerce platform and search engine.
-  National Philanthropic Trust - Built and licensed a toolset for automatically creating aggregated topic-based news feeds.
-  Living Independently - Provided interim CTO services to the health care startup including technology team recruitment and leadership, product development, and vendor management.  Progressed from concept to functional prototype in one month.  Throughout the one year engagement delivered an end-to-end consumer solution.
-  RippleTech - Assisted executive management team with technology strategies for launching the company’s second product line.  Mentored CTO throughout a business-critical project re-architecture project.

Topular

Founder and President

Started as itch/scratch-ware, Fast PDF has progressed from a side-project done with a friend, to a solid example of how a simple web application that solves an unmet need can thrive on the web. Eventually, I sold the company to my cofounder in exchange for half of the cash in the bank, and a lifetime of sushi lunches.

Fast PDF

Co-Founder

When first starting out as a consultant, Andrea founded Unit of 1, a networking group that helps (very) small business owners run more effective companies.  The group organically grew to over 500 consultants.

Unit of 1

Managing Director

Consulted as an interim Chief Technology Officer to startups.  Expertise in project management, systems architecture, and technology team leadership.

Sample client engagements include:
-  Health Market Science - Fulfilled interim CTO role to write technology plan, revamp business plan, and assist in due diligence meetings with venture capitalists.
-  Idealab – Worked with team working through early business planning / prototyping of a new search product.
-  Performed due diligence for angel investors.

1-800-CTO

Technology Management Consultant

A content service provider of news feeds on thousands of topics.  Every day EchoFactor uncovered 50,000 new headlines from 2,000 quality sources.  The patented technology behind EchoFactor uses metadata extraction techniques to automatically reorganize the web by topic.

-  Defined and managed an aggressive product release schedule.  Led seed team from idea to functional prototype in 5 weeks, launched public beta 8 weeks later, and hit scheduled release dates every 4-6 weeks thereafter.
-  Built a fault-tolerant, horizontally scalable intelligent-agent system with a hardware budget of less than $35,000
-  Maintained full P&L responsibility, including all budgeting, forecasting, capital expenditures, and headcount allocation.
-  Secured $500K in seed funding.  Presented the business plan to over a dozen venture capital firms.  Secured a term sheet for $1.5 million in Series A funding.

EchoFactor.com

Co-Founder and Chief Technologist

Infonautics was an Internet pioneer of personalized information agents and websites delivering relevant information to businesses and consumers.  Sites in the Infonautics Network included <a href="http://CompanySleuth.com">CompanySleuth.com</a>, <a href="http://EntertainmentSleuth.com">EntertainmentSleuth.com</a>, <a href="http://JobSleuth.com">JobSleuth.com</a>, <a href="http://SportsSleuth.com">SportsSleuth.com</a>, <a href="http://eLibrary.com">eLibrary.com</a>, and <a href="http://Encyclopedia.com">Encyclopedia.com</a>.

-  Set technology direction and product roadmap for all the company’s products.
-  Reorganized and rebuilt the technology team after a merger in which 2/3 of the company was sold.  Included development of new reporting hierarchies and product strategies.
-  Oversaw a team of 65 including: technology managers, software engineers, system administrators, quality assurance, and graphic designers.  Setup and directed an offshore development team for product maintenance.

Infonautics Corporation

Director of Technology

Architected a multi-threaded, RPC based server for use in medical image processing systems.

Picker International

Senior Software Engineer

Designed and developed a Virtual Patient Folder to link disparate sources of medical information.