Joel Bronkowski heads up partnerships for WooCommerce and has found a world of purpose in building a powerful, global and assessable product that is changing the way the world does eCommerce. He now resides in London where he attempts to be hip enough to work remotely from Shoreditch coffee shops.
Lukas Jakob Hafner is the CEO of booncon PIXELS. His strong background in technology mixed with a degree in design make him a hands-on UX and UI specialist. Besides developing Wordpress based web-applications for clients he loves to experiment with Front-end frameworks and to coach start-ups on branding.
Heather Brunner is CEO for WP Engine and has steered the company to hyper-growth and global expansion with offices in Austin, San Antonio, London and San Francisco serving 40,000 customers in 133 countries. A 25-year technology veteran, She helped create billions in value, driven customer success and led business strategy for both privately-funded new ventures and Fortune 500 companies.
Zac Gordon is a professional educator, currently working with the JavaScript for WordPress Master Course. Previously, Zac taught WordPress for Treehouse. He has years of experience teaching WordPress and Web Development at the college level and high school level. In addition to teaching, Zac also runs Web Hosting for Students.
Andy Sernovitz teaches word of mouth marketing and social media. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking. He leads SocialMedia.org, the community for social media leaders at the world’s greatest brands, and WordofMouth.org, where marketers and entrepreneurs learn to be great at word of mouth marketing.
Seth Rand, Founder and CEO of Rand Marketing, is an Internet Marketing Expert with over 13 years of Search Engine Marketing experience, having assisted over 1,000 businesses. Seth is a speaker and published author on a variety of topics that focus on business and marketing, was named to Google Partners AllStars in 2015, and serves on the Board of Directors of the BBB.
Beka Rice works at SkyVerge, where she wears many hats. She manages sales pages and documentation for over 60 WooCommerce extensions, maintains the SkyVerge blog and website, and manages team processes like internal documentation and pre-sales questions. She also manages SellwithWP.com, where she writes and edits articles on creating an eCommerce business powered by WordPress.
As VP of Business Development at Automattic, Catherine Stewart manages M&A, partnerships, and internal projects. Catherine previously wrangled at Facebook, Penguin Random House, and McKinsey and is an avid hiker, skier, and tea-drinker.
Tony Perez is one of the co-founders of and CEO at Sucuri; a globally recognized website security firm specializing in cleaning and protecting websites. He has spent the better part of five years building an organization designed to provide value to website owners when they need it most. He has worked with 100’s of thousands of websites, helping them navigate their online security challenges, has spoken at events and conferences around the world, and is adamant in the power of education and awareness. He actively writes and shares his thoughts on both business and security on his personal web properties.
Zohar Gilad is the CEO and Co-Founder of InstantSearch+, bringing state-of-the-art eCommerce site search to online merchants – at an affordable cost. Throughout his career, Zohar has been the driving force behind over 20 software products that have since been used by millions of users worldwide at large enterprises, small businesses, and consumers.
Bob Dunn, AKA BobWP, is a WordPress trainer and CEO of the newly launched BobWP Online Courses. He blogs at BobWP.com. Bob has taught thousands of users to wrap their brains around WordPress. Prior to that, he co-owned a marketing company for 20 years. He has been a proud user of WooCommerce since it was released.
Daniel Espinoza has been working with WooCommerce since the plugin started in 2011. He built the first commercial plugin for WooCommerce and have built dozens of plugins since then. He is the principal at Grow Development a WooCommerce consultancy where he helps comapanies build profitable ecommerce sites. He hosts the San Antonio WooCommerce meetup and builds plugins at Shop Plugins.
Drew Sanocki is a New York-based private equity investor and operator. He sold his own online retailer, DesignPublic.com, in 2011 and became an operational partner at a direct-to-consumer private equity firm. He is currently directing growth initiatives for ten top retailers including Karmaloop.com. He shares his top data-driven growth secrets at NerdMarketing.com.
Chase Reeves is the co-founder and creative director of Fizzle.co where he’s dedicated to making the most effective and engaging training for freelancers, creatives and entrepreneurs. He lives in Portland, Oregon with a (very) lovely wife and a (very) energetic 6 year old son.
Chris Lema is the CTO and Chief Strategist at Crowd Favorite. He’s also a daily blogger, a public speaker, and product strategist. He helps companies leverage WordPress, and helps WordPress companies find leverage. For twenty years Chris has developed and managed high performing engineers to build software products – particularly SaaS products in a variety of B2B vertical markets. He’s also spent the last ten years coaching startups on product development and marketing strategies.
Kenn Kelly is head of strategy and co-founder of Never Settle, a company that builds custom enterprise WordPress and WooCommerce business solutions. Kenn has founded three tech companies and two world causes. His background in management consulting and building both Fortune 100 and Silicon Valley startup solutions fuel Kenn’s visionary insight in developing SaaS technologies that run global and local companies. He is passionate about leveraging company culture to impact global humanitarian issues.
Merrill Mayer is the owner and web developer at Kool Kat Web Designs. She works with designers to create custom solutions for small to medium sized business and non-profits. Merrill began her career studying for a master’s degree in French at the University of Michigan. There she worked on computerizing French demographic data and got hooked on technology.
Laura Behrens Wu is the founder and CEO of Shippo. Shippo simplifies shipping for e-commerce companies by offering discounted shipping rates and a streamlined solution across all different shipping providers. It’s Amazon-level shipping for all e-commerce stores. Laura runs a 20 people team based in San Francisco and is most interested in the data component that comes with shipping.
Mindy Postoff is a WooCommerce Support Ninja at Automattic. She finds working in technical support extremely fulfilling, as it satisfies her fierce drive to help people, while also throwing in healthy levels of geekiness. Her superpower is being able to combine equal parts empathy with problem-solving skills.
Ellen Wixted is Director of Product Management for Avalara TrustFile, and is grateful that she and her family get to live in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Combining technology with creative problem-solving has been a lifelong passion, and she’s excited to be helping eCommerce business owners make sales tax less taxing. Get started with sales tax: […]
Kandace Brigleb is a cofounder and producer at Needmore Designs, a design studio in rainy Portland, Oregon. Deeply influenced by her early Anthropological studies, she works with coffee, wine, and lifestyle brands to tell their stories in the digital and analog realms. She is co-host of the show Unpacking Coffee.
Peep Laja is the founder of ConversionXL. He was voted as the most influential conversion rate optimization expert in 2015. He helps fast-growing companies grow even faster through his services, coaching, courses and the world’s favorite optimization blog.
Matt White has been an entrepreneur ever since he can remember. What he loves about entrepreneurship is the part where he gets to HELP people – business owners, start-ups, marketing folks and other entrepreneurs. From black-market “reminders” in the 5th grade to developing content marketing today, his focus has always been to help people.
Mark Hagan brings more than 15 years of development experience to his role as eCommerce Development Manager for Heartland Payment Systems. He works with both merchants and developers to reduce their overall cost of payments acceptance. Mark has integrated Heartland into more than 50 of the leading online store platforms used by Heartland’s eCommerce merchants – including WooCommerce.
Kevin Bates is on the WooCommerce Growth Team at Automattic. For 10 years now he’s been helping businesses big and small grow their audience and increase revenue through both organic and paid channels.
Patrick Rauland is a Yoga monkey, minimalist, web enthusiast, gamer, poly, author, Product Manager for #WooCommerce at @automattic, and the guy who makes crazy sound effects
Shayla Price creates and promotes content. She lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology, and social responsibility. Originally from Louisiana, Shayla is passionate about red velvet cupcakes.
Lee Blue entered into the arena of ecommerce after working with the United States Homeland Security Bio-terrorism Defense Team. With a focus on security, he and his team at Reality66 launched a series of WordPress eCommerce projects including Cart66, Mijireh, and Secure Hosted Payments.
Bryce Adams is a nomadic coder (currently based in Melbourne, Australia) working for Automattic on the biggest WooCommerce store in the world – WooThemes.com. He loves open source software, building useful products and interacting with the open-source and eCommerce communities! In his spare time, he’s either traveling the world and speaking at events or building small products that try to push the boundaries of everyday eCommerce development with open-source hardware.
Dustin W. Stout is the CMO of Weal Media and co-founder of Warfare Plugins. He is also a former actor and model turned geek, WordPress evangelist, speaker and widely recognized blogger. Dustin helps individuals and brands grow their reach and accelerate their online presence through digital strategy and design. He’s also a coffee lover and technology enthusiast.
Miracle Wanzo is an eCommerce entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in online and offline retail sales, manufacturing and importing.
Brent Shepherd is the lead developer of WooCommerce Subscriptions, one of the largest and most popular extensions in the official extension marketplace. WooCommerce is Brent’s hobby and profession and he founded Prospress, a company dedicated to building content, community and products on top of WooCommerce and co-organises the WooCommerce San Francisco Meetup.
Michael Steele is a co-founder of Member Up, a small Texas consultancy that helps people build and grow membership products. He also has courageously ventured into the dark abyss of running an eCommerce shop with his wife, Terri. He hopes to survive emotionally intact.
David has been a speaker and web-entrepreneur since 2003 and has extensive experience with WordPress, Joomla and e-commerce solutions. As an entrepreneur he codes and sells his software products internationally (WordPress plugins and Joomla extensions). He is most known in the Netherlands for his experience with payment systems, specifically iDEAL, the number one Dutch payment method with 900 million transactions.
Josh Cary is the eCommerce Director at All Things Barbecue. Along with diving deep into analytics day to day he is responsible for the planning of all content marketing across four barbecue brands. You can hear him weekly on The SauceCast barbecue podcast.
Rahul Deshpande is Vice President for Simplify Commerce by MasterCard. He is a professional in the payment industry, conversant with different networks, fee structures, security implications and PCI compliance. Rahul currently leads the Simplify Commerce) technology team, providing functionality that enables small businesses to accept payments quickly anywhere sales happen.
Ashwin Raj is the head of Amazon Payments and Amazon Webstore in North America. Since 2014, Ashwin has led Amazon’s growth and expansion efforts to enable third-party merchants to utilize Amazon Payments and Webstore capabilities. This involves the sales, business development and onboarding of merchants directly and through partnerships with eCommerce platform providers.
Andrew Wikel is a WooCommerce ninja at Automattic. He is committed to open source values and loves working with WordPress. He fell in love with WordPress in 2008, and has been working with it in some capacity since then. A husband, a father, a WordCamp addict, a coffee snob, lover of shiny things, and a California native […]
David Lockie has worked with WordPress for around eight years, first as a dabbler, then as a freelancer, now as founder and entrepreneur. Along the way he’s found purpose, passion and success. He lives in Brighton, UK, with his family and loves fitness, mountain biking and whiskey.
Hristo Pandjarov has been working for SiteGround as a WordPress expert for more than seven years now. He’s done it all: supported WordPress clients, built websites, designed WordPress themes. In addition to that he’s author of many online tutorials and guides about WordPress. He’s been fortunate to have his passion for all things WordPress and his job overlap at SiteGround, where he develops and implements various in-house performance boost solutions to help make WordPress websites faster and more secure.
Brian Krogsgard is a web developer, writer, and consultant based in Birmingham, Alabama. He’s the editor of Post Status, a news and information website for WordPress professionals. It’s a community-centric subscription website with hundreds of members doing incredible things with WordPress.
Nicole Kohler is the Content Creator for Automattic’s Growth team. Her passion is helping business owners find ways to use quality content to engage with prospects and online shoppers.
Mark Faggiano is the CEO of TaxJar – the leading sales tax compliance provider in ecommerce. Mark’s built a career around his passion for using technology to solve complex problems for small businesses. He previously co-founded FileLater, the most well know tax extension service, which was acquired in 2010.
Matt Mullenweg is a co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic, the company that acquired WooCommerce in July 2015 as a first step towards making it easy for anyone to sell online independently, without being locked into closed, centralized services. Matt was born and raised in Houston, Texas and writes code, prose, and music.
Patrick Garman is a Sr. E-Commerce Specialist at ColourPop Cosmetics, one of the fastest growing WooCommerce stores around. Formerly a WooCommerce extension developer, WooCommerce Ninja at WooThemes, and a developer at WebDevStudios & Maintainn; altogether giving Patrick a unique set of skills and experience in WooCommerce, product development, enterprise WordPress development, and scaling WooCommerce.
Juan Benitez is a senior technology leader with nearly 20 years of industry experience in software development and engineering. He is the General Manager at Braintree, a PayPal company, where he leads the Braintree team in delivering a payments platform and service simplifying access to powerful payments solutions. Before joining Braintree, Juan held the position of VP of Search Advertising at Yahoo!. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University and currently resides in California.
Jake Gasaway is a co-founder and VP of Platform at Stitch Labs. He spent the early part of his career with major manufacturing companies, Philip Morris U.S.A and the Campbell Soup Company. Jake has taken learnings from those businesses and helped apply them to small businesses everywhere.