The Team
Andy, Eugene, and Rob are the three co-founders of Abine. Each of us has been working (founding, investing, or operating) with tech startups for over a decade now and we have experience in and passion for internet security.
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William Kerrigan, CEO
William Kerrigan is an experienced business leader with a distinguished career spanning 30 years. For the past 2 years, Kerrigan was the President and CEO of RadialPoint which works with the worlds largest ISPs to distribute consumer-friendly technology and security solutions.
For 5 years, Bill was McAfee's Executive Vice President of Worldwide Consumer Business responsible for strategy, execution and financial performance of McAfee's global consumer business. During Bill's tenure, subscription revenue grew 367% to over $400M while subscriber base expanded from 1.8M to over 23M. He integrated acquisitions, including McAfee.com and SiteAdvisor, and established innovative, metric driven go-to-market strategies to drive growth.
His background also includes other CEO or senior executive roles at Shaman, Corporate Software, and IBM, as well as board membership at leading consumer companies, such as Carbonite.
Eugene Kuznetsov, Chairman
Eugene Kuznetsov was most recently an executive at IBM, with responsibility for product management and marketing of SOA appliances. In addition to his P&L management duties, Kuznetsov is also a member of IBM Software Group Architecture Board and IBM AIM (WebSphere) Strategy Council.
Kuznetsov joined IBM through acquisition of DataPower in October 2005, with substantial returns for all shareholders. Both Kuznetsov's business and technical leadership has received recognition, including the prestigious InfoWorld Top 25 CTOs of 2005 and regional Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2006 awards.
Eugene founded DataPower in 1999 based on his idea of combining dynamic compilation and network hardware technology to simplify the process of connecting disparate applications and served as President until spring 2003. The company developed the first "XML-aware networking" hardware, then unique in delivering message-level processing functions within a secure network device. DataPower's broad product family ensures award-winning security, performance and manageability for XML, Web Services and SOA applications. Kuznetsov served as President, VP of Marketing, CTO and Chairman at various points in the company's six year history as it grew from one to 75 employees, raising over $20M from investors and building a customer list of household names.
Prior to DataPower, Eugene worked or consulted for a number of companies, including Analogic and Microsoft; he has worked on a variety of hardware and software engineering problems in the areas of memory management, power electronics, JIT compilers, optimized execution engines and application integration. His outside research interests are focused on analog electrical engineering. Kuznetsov earned a BSEE from MIT.
Kuznetsov's articles have appeared in ZDNet, EETimes, XML Journal, Network World, Java Report, eBizQ and SC Magazine. He is a well regarded speaker at numerous conferences and events including Digital ID World, NetSec, JavaOne, Networld+Interop, Web Services DevCon, MITRE XML Day, NECINA, Web Services Edge, Gartner's Application Integration and Web Services Summit and the IT Security & Privacy Conference.
Andrew Sudbury
Andrew has been involved in the security industry and the problems of managing information security at scale. He combines security and financial experience to apply risk modeling and analysis techniques to information security topics. He has written and spoken as these topics, most recently at RSA 2009 as part of the Center for Internet Security's Metrics Panel.
As an early employee at @stake, a premier information security consultancy, Andrew assessed the security of network storage devices and high-privacy filesystems, as well as started research into quantitative security modeling. He has also performed financial analytics for special projects, such as determining the option value and exercise efficiency of rate locks in a mortgage origination pipeline at Everbank, an innovative private bank.
Most recently, as VP of Security Metrics, he led the creation of information security metrics and scorecards from concept through the first million in sales at ClearPoint Metrics, a security metrics product start-up. Other past experiences include custom system design for corporate and DoD clients and founding the first cyber-cafe and Linux-based public access terminal network in Boston (Cafe Liberty/NetPod).
Andrew received an MBA from MIT Sloan and a SB from MIT. As part of the MIT community, Andrew has been a judge for the MITES business plan contest for local high-school students and the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for innovation. He still can't use any kind of Linux but Slackware, and is a two-wheeled enthusiast.
Rob Shavell
Rob was most recently involved with consumer Web investments focused on groups and identity protection; as a co-founder of the identity protection site Identity Breach.com and product consultant with Identity Force, as co-founder of one of the first consumer group travel portals, "TravelTogether.com," and as the first angel investor in Wikispaces, a editable hosted Web site creation platform for use by groups with several million users.
Prior to this, Rob was recruited by the founder and CEO of LRN to start a new line of business where he helped to convene a group of Fortune 100 companies including Tyco, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Dow Chemical to join in a formal partnership and co-develop a solution which he designd, managed, and successfully brought to market- and is in use by millions of employees and which is available globally in over a dozen languages.
Rob was an associate at Softbank Capital Partners (Boston) and Softbank / Mobius Venture Capital (Silicon Valley) where he helped fund two Series A software startups (Python for enterprise and Microsoft Office real-time data exchange) and worked directly with a dozen portfolio investments including Stratify (sold to Iron Mountain NYSE:IRM) across three funds totaling $3.2 billion.
He began working in New York where he joined the first US office of Datamonitor Plc. (sold to Informa Group Plc. UK:INF) where Rob led the US technology research group and was frequently quoted in Newsweek, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, PC Magazine and the New York Times.
Rob has a BA from Cornell University where he began his studies in the school of Architecture. A volunteer teacher in New York and California, Rob contributes to inner-city youth development programs and skis and reads as time permits.
Brian Michon, VP of Engineering
Brian Michon brings extensive software development experience to Abine after serving in executive and technology positions at Intuit, Linden Lab, Oracle and consumer-web startups such as Apps.com. At Intuit Brian was the vice president of Shared Development and Services, delivering software platform and product services that improved both the development speed and the end user experience for customers of TurboTax, QuickBooks, Quicken, and payroll businesses. Intuit acquired Michon's startup Apps.com in 2000. At Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life, Michon ran the server engineering team responsible for delivering virtual world services to a hundred thousand global concurrent users running 3D simulation on a grid of approximately 32,000 processors.
Earlier in his career Brian was a Visiting Scientist at MIT Project Athena where practically everything we know about distributed computing was invented. Brian also lead the server and API development of the object relational extensions in Oracle.
Michon earned his MSCS from Stanford and a BSCS from MIT. Brian also advises Boston Rising, a new antipoverty fund, on how to leverage technology to end the cycle of poverty in Boston.
Kristina Kennedy, VP of Marketing
Kristina Kennedy joined Abine as VP of Marketing in 2012. Kennedy has focused on building high growth consumer-web brands. Prior to joining Abine, she was an integral part of Zipcar's marketing team, leading communications throughout North America and the UK as the company achieved exponential growth.
Most recently, Kennedy held a leadership role at Gazelle where she managed a team responsible for brand, communications, and acquisition activities. During her tenure, the company grew to more than 250,000 customers and achieved 5753% revenue growth, ranking #35 in INC Magazine's list of America's fastest growing private companies. Kennedy earned her BA from the University of Notre Dame.
Our Advisory Board
- Mathias Entenmann, senior executive at BetFair, formerly VP International at PayPal
- David Muller, CEO at Avedro, formerly founder of DataSafe (a consumer privacy company), formerly founder of Summit Technology (the first laser vision correction company)
- Eric Jung, a leading FireFox add-on developer, board member of mozdev.org, author of FoxyProxy and PasswordMaker (8+ million downloads), JetPack Core developer, Mozilla Add-Ons editor and prominent Mozilla community member.
- Jim Jorgensen, partner at Morgen Group, serial enterpreneur and independent investor, formerly CEO of AllAdvantage, founder and CEO, Challenger Sports, founder and CEO of Discovery Zone
