<a href="https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMipgFodHRwczovL3d3dy5wcm5ld3N3aXJlLmNvbS9uZXdzLXJlbGVhc2VzL3Jvby1zdXJwYXNzZXMtNC0wMDAtdmV0ZXJpbmFyeS1wcm9mZXNzaW9uYWxzLWFzLWNlby1jaG9vc2VzLW5ldy1sZWFkZXItdG8tc2NhbGUtdGhlLXBsYXRmb3JtLXRvLXRoZS1uZXh0LWxldmVsLTMwMTg0NTIyNC5odG1s0gEA?oc=5" target="_blank">Roo Surpasses 4,000 Veterinary Professionals as CEO Chooses ...</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#6f6f6f">PR Newswire</font>

Roo Surpasses 4,000 Veterinary Professionals as CEO Chooses ... - PR Newswire

<a href="https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiTGh0dHBzOi8vZmluYW5jZS55YWhvby5jb20vbmV3cy9yb28tc3VycGFzc2VzLTQtMDAwLXZldGVyaW5hcnktMDkwMDAwNTgyLmh0bWzSAVRodHRwczovL2ZpbmFuY2UueWFob28uY29tL2FtcGh0bWwvbmV3cy9yb28tc3VycGFzc2VzLTQtMDAwLXZldGVyaW5hcnktMDkwMDAwNTgyLmh0bWw?oc=5" target="_blank">Roo Surpasses 4,000 Veterinary Professionals as CEO Chooses New Leader to Scale the Platform to the Next Level</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#6f6f6f">Yahoo Finance</font>

Roo Surpasses 4,000 Veterinary Professionals as CEO Chooses New Leader to Scale the Platform to the Next Level - Yahoo Finance

Trinity University

CEO @ Tophatter

San Francisco, California, United States

Tophatter

Chief Executive Officer

Vice President Of Product Strategy

Crew is a communications app that keeps everyone on the same page about everything work-related. Crew gives companies and frontline employees a new way to communicate, stay engaged and be more successful. Unlike collaboration software that has evolved around the needs of office workers, Crew is the first communications app designed specifically for the millions of workers who don’t have ready access to effective communication technology on the job. From store clerks, restaurant managers, coaches, to pharmacists, nurses, and first responders, thousands of teams across every industry use Crew to help their businesses and organizations run more smoothly.

Crew

CEO & Co-founder

I founded Yardsellr in October 2009 with the vision to re-imagine how person-to-person commerce on the web was going to work. I believe that the idea of a walled-garden marketplace (e.g. eBay, Craigslist, etc) is antiquated. Over time, social media and messaging services will become the primary plumbing for engaging in person-to-person commerce. Yardsellr was a service that operated like a layer on top of Facebook and Twitter to augment these services and provide the marketplace-specific functionality so that items could be bought and sold in the social feeds of users.

At it's height, Yardsellr listings reached 18M users per month and we processed more than 150k orders/payments each month on behalf of buyers and sellers. I raised $16M from Tiger Global, Accel Partners and Harrison Metal and the company grew to 50 employees. The growth gave me experience rapidly scaling a number of functions in the business, especially engineering, customer support, marketing/merchandising and payment processing.

Yardsellr

Founder & CEO

I built InGameNow as a side project with fellow eBay alums Ryan Spoon and Josh Scott. The service was essentially a Twitter for Sports, organized around teams and games. InGameNow was one of the first sports apps released for the iPhone. A key feature that propelled growth was the ability for fans use the service across platforms: the web, an iOS app and chat services like AIM and GTalk. At its height, InGameNow had 300k monthly active users.

InGameNow

Co-Founder & CTO

VideoSurf was a computer-vision technology company turned video search engine that Microsoft acquired in 2011 for $100m. It was founded by repeat entrepreneurs and was funded by a list of prominent investors like Al Gore, Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Hyatt and others. I joined VideoSurf as employee #7, the first business team member. As the only native English speaker on the executive team, I became intimately involved in all aspects of running the company.

My primary responsibility at VideoSurf was to develop a business model. My product vision was to build an ad targeting system (and advertising network) because testing revealed that VideoSurf's unique visual data could enable substantially more efficient video ad targeting and serving. After designing the product, I signed up the first distribution partners and sold the first ads.

For the first time in my career, I assumed technical responsibilities as part of my job - leading the engineering effort and even writing a sizable percentage of the code. In doing so, I learned that there was a tremendous advantage when a strong product leader can also provide technical leadership.

VideoSurf

VP, Business Development

I rejoined eBay as a category manager focused on the growing business equipment category on eBay. I was initially assigned to focus on the Construction and Agriculture categories where I developed a business case to treat heavy equipment categories differently than lower ASP categories on eBay. The thesis was that transactions involving backhoes and tractors requires different features/functionality and fee pricing than Pez dispensers. My efforts led to the roll-out out a new pricing model, increased buyer protections and other category-specific functionality. The enhancements accelerated growth in my categories to 100% YoY, a rate that endured even well after I moved on from B2B Category Management. By the time I left, business-to-business trade on eBay had grown to $4.7 Billion annually.

As my tenure went on, my desire to impact the product roadmap grew tremendously. Frustrated with the speed of development at eBay, I yearned to be able to prototype my ideas and bring them to the site faster. In the evenings, I taught myself Java and assembled my own Java webapp stack over a 2 year period. Coding was empowering and I was eager to use my new skills at work.

Having learned to code, I started prototyping my ideas for new products at eBay in my spare time. I was frequently demo'ing my project to my peers and many of the ideas inspired whole new features on the eBay site. There was so much interest in what I was doing that developing prototypes and working on new business ideas became a significant component of my official job.

eBay

Manager, eBay Business

Energized by the opportunity to take my internally incubated startup at eBay to the next level, I raised a seed round of funding from prominent car-industry executives to complete the spin-out. Methodically, we convinced the largest banks and automobile finance companies in the country to liquidate their offlease and reposessesion inventory through us, directly to consumers online. Our clients were lenders like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase Bank, Huntington Automotive Finance, National City Bank as well as the US Government and through our marketplace, they liquidated over $100 million worth of assets. In 2004, Red McCombs Automotive acquired IRI Motors.

IRI Motors

I jumped at the opportunity to work at soon-to-be-launched eBay Motors because I already believed by then that the Internet presented the ultimate way to buy and sell anything nationally, even cars. In my new role, I was sent to join a newly acquired subsidiary, Kruse International to create and execute an online strategy for what had traditionally been an offline auction house of collector automobiles. At Kruse, I launched a white-glove service that sold rare vehicles on eBay on behalf of well-off collectors who were unwilling or not saavy enough to market these cars on their own. The service was a huge hit, delivering $26m in annualized sales just 9 months after launch.

Looking for the next step-function growth of that business, it became clear that the business opportunity in the collector car market paled in comparison to the opportunity presented by a huge repossession and off-lease vehicle liquidation market that was currently being fueled by the post-September 11th economy. In order to pursue this opportunity, it became clear that this needed to be a separate company from eBay. I negotiated a deal with eBay to spin out my startup as a separate company and I raised money to fund the acquisition and capitalization of the new venture.

Kruse International, an eBay Company

Director, eBusiness

I started ICG while in high school after I realized that the summer job I had taken at a computer repair shop was something I could do on my own. By the time it came to go "off to college", I realized I had created a great business for myself, helping ad agencies and schools in San Antonio, TX connect their computers to the Internet and create websites.

Danny Leffel