Simon is a serial entrepreneur having founded and built six businesses (“won two, drawn two, lost one”, The Sandpit is his sixth) in the tech, marketing and publishing sectors in Europe. Besides overall responsibility for making sure the bread is on the table and top level Sandpit strategic vision/direction, his primary focus is on sales, funding and commercial strategy for The Sandpit and portfolio companies.
Richard is an experienced and engaging CIMA qualified accountant with an unconventional finance background in both commercial and academic roles. He looks after all finance related activities for The Sandpit and Portfolio Companies, including cash management, statutory, management and investor reporting.
Jesse is an experienced technology sales & marketing leader with a successful track record of building highly effective teams, specialising in new business acquisition and development of new solution sales, products and end user markets.
Si is Creative Strategist. He makes sure that each portfolio company’s branding and visual impact enable them to reach their goals. His role covers graphic and web design, as well as marketing and brand strategy.
Ashley is an industry leader on digital and social business strategy and the future of content. As Spredfast’s VP of social strategy, Ashley helps customers deliver innovative, market-leading social experiences that exceed the expectations of their audience. Prior to joining Spredfast, Ashley was the group director of digital communications and social media at Coca-Cola. During his time at Coke, Ashley developed the company’s first digital content strategy, launched the online magazine Coca-Cola Journey, created its first corporate news blog, Coca-Cola Unbottled, and grew Coke’s corporate social channels more than 100% year over year. He was named both an Advertising Age and PR Week “40 Under 40” in 2013.
Benjamin Spiegel is the Chief Executive Officer at MMI Agency, a Houston-based brand activation agency that has been serving Fortune 500 clients since 1986. A digital advertising veteran with extensive experience in advertising, media, data, and technology, Benjamin has developed highly successful marketing campaigns for numerous global brands. Prior to joining MMI Agency, he was the VP of Innovation at Catalyst/GroupM, a WPP agency, where he managed the P&G business.
Eric Olden is a serial entrepreneur. He currently is the technical CEO of Brite Content, a US content marketing engagement platform, and previously co-founded Symplified, which created the market for cloud SSO, and Securant to secure Web apps. He is also the founder of Launch Sciences and Deep Content. Eric built $225 million in equity value with 2 startups and raised $80 million in venture capital. He is an active mentor at both TechStars and UC Berkeley’s SkyDeck accelerators, and is an angel investor.
James Bromley is COO at Softkey, one of the UK’s most successful startups in the mobile space, and was previously MD at MailOnline.com. Described by some as a product obsessive, Bromley has worked across the business, bringing the development, product, editorial and commercial arenas closer together to enable faster and better end products to be delivered to users. Bromley has also angel invested and mentored an impressive selection of startups.
Serial entrepreneur, involved in IPO, £100m+trade sale. Built agencies, startup studio, coworking space and investor in 50+ startups. Now advising accelerators, incubators, funds and corporations on growth and being more entrepreneurial.
Ron Goddard is CEO of TechVentures.London, a consultancy and advisory business, and is also an Angel Investor, non-exec director, interim management consultant and board member of several startups. Additionally, he is a certified Mentor for one of the world’s biggest accelerator startup programme, MassChallenge.
Tom Jenen is a board advisor and strategic consultant in online media and advertising technology. Most recently, Tom was Head of Marketplace Development for Northern Europe at Google, helping to lead premium programmatic strategy and execution. Prior to this, Tom launched Admeld in EMEA, serving premium publishers in 16 countries and helping to establish its reputation as the premier sell-side platform globally. Tom joined Admeld in 2008 after over 15 years leading global marketing efforts for Eyeblaster/ MediaMind, Phorm, Falk eSolutions and Opus360/Freeagent.com, and a pre-Internet career as creative director for web, direct marketing and communications agencies.
Xen is the founder of a digital personal incubator and investment house called Ophin Ventures. Prior to this he was the hands-on CTO for News International where he successfully lead a major technology transformation programme. Xen’s career also included various roles with Google, Microsoft and Accenture. His contributions here were recognized with several top achiever awards, including the Google OC award, the second-highest employee award in the company.
