Ken Simpson, CEO and Founder
Prior to founding MailChannels, Ken Simpson was a founder and CTO of FatPort, Canada's largest wireless hotspot provider. At FatPort, Ken was responsible for securing financing, assembling a world-class executive team, managing the development and roll-out of the company's hotspot network, and establishing strategic technology relationships with leading companies including Intel. Prior to FatPort, Ken was an early employee at several successful technology firms in the Pacific Northwest region, including ActiveState, which developed one of the first enterprise grade anti spam solutions. Ken graduated with from Simon Fraser University and Santa Clara University with a First Class Honors Degree in Computer Engineering.
Mike Smith, Director of Development
Mike Smith has managed productive development teams at numerous successful startups for over ten years. As one of the first developers hired at ActiveState, Mike was instrumental in designing and developing the highly successful PerlMX email security product, which attracted computer security pioneer Sophos to purchase the company. At ActiveState, Mike was also responsible for implementing key initiatives in e-commerce, licensing, and customer support. As the first employee at identity management solution provider SXIP Networks, Mike established the company's information infrastructure, contributed to SXIP's patents, and developed many of the innovations fuelling SXIP's success.
Stas Bekman, Director of Research
Stas Bekman has spent his professional career working on mission critical software and infrastructure for global IT companies including Intel. Most recently, Stas was employed by TicketMaster to develop the web application infrastructure underlying TicketMaster's high availability e-commerce system. The platform Stas developed is used by Amazon.com, the BBC and many other of the world's largest and most successful web sites. In recognition of his contributions to the global IT community, Mr. Bekman was awarded the prestigious White Camel award at the 2005 O'Reilly OpenSource Conference in Portland, Oregon. He is a co-author of the O'Reilly book "Practical mod_perl" and is sought after worldwide as an educator and key note speaker.
