Ari Kaufman, Chief Executive Officer
Ari Kaufman is an accomplished start-up, turn-around and early-stage growth company leader. As a founder of Zacks.com he pioneered the online advertising industry with the explosive growth of the first fully ad-supported web site in 1996. In 2000 he drove World Investor Link to IPO on the London Stock Exchange as Chief Strategy Officer. He later founded interactive lead-gen advertising firm ThinkAcquisition and sold it in 2003. In 2005 he joined forces with the new founders of the restart of MatchLogic and introduced first-party display ad-serving to the industry. Following MatchLogic he served as General Manager for LookSmart where he managed the CPC text ad network and platform that processed over $250M in revenue including ASK.com and other major ad networks. As the President of LocationInsight, Ari is now driving the vision for bringing localized SEO to the online advertising community on a performance (PPC) basis. His focus and leadership is committed to the growing the company and emerging as the source of location-based solutions that drive local online organic search traffic and expand web site and mobile usage for online advertisers with many physical locations.
Wayne Applehans, Vice President of Business Operations
Wayne Applehans is a seasoned technology leader with over 20 years of proven experience in business operations, marketing, consulting, and product development with start-up, mid-market, and fortune 50 technology companies. His recent tenure with Microsoft leading global initiatives in professional services, engineering, and digital relationship marketing resulted in growing customer satisfaction, improving customer reach, and improving advocacy for the Windows platform. Prior to joining Microsoft, his leadership role within IT Operations and Marketing at JDEdwards led to operational efficiencies in sales, marketing, and services yielding time savings of 7-10 hours in un-billable utilization expenses and global savings annually of $4.2M. These results are detailed in the book co-authored by Wayne entitled “Managing Knowledge” which hit Amazon’s top 50 when published in 1997. Wayne’s efforts to combine web development with content management to improve operational efficiencies within JDEdwards resulted in a Smithsonian Award and later led Wayne to raise $5.5M in venture capital to finance Brain Ranger, a local content management software and consulting firm in Denver. As the VP of Business Operations of LocationInsight, Wayne is responsible for driving the product roadmap and customer experience including account management, sales, marketing, and professional services across our valued portfolio of customers.
Jake Meier, Vice President of Technology
Jake Meier is an experienced local search architect and engineering manager and brings more than 10 years of enterprise application development experience to LocationInsight. As the former VP of Engineering for Denver-based Local Matters Inc., Jake built and led engineering, product development, research & development and a professional services team consisting of more than 40 engineers. Jake is also an InfoNow Alumni. Prior to Local Matters, Jake worked as a member of the company’s ChannelInsight team, where he developed the early-stage designs for the company’s current core analytics platform. Throughout his career, Jake has built high-performance search solutions that benefit the online advertising industry with a focus on search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) and enterprise local search technologies. Jake leads LocationInsight’s technology organization with a focus on refining the processes needed to support the organization’s aggressive growth and developing products that promote success for our clients.