Sam Decker, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

Prior to Mass Relevance, Sam Decker was founding Chief Marketing Officer at Bazaarvoice, the leader in Software as a Service (SaaS) social commerce technologies serving over 1,000 brands. Decker was responsible for building the company’s brand, products and platform. Before joining Bazaarvoice, Decker spent seven years of leadership at Dell, Inc. in marketing, online, CRM, and customer-centricity strategy. From 1999-2003, he led Dell’s consumer web site, building Dell.com into the largest consumer eCommerce site at $3.5B in annual sales, and established global best practices in merchandising, analytics, product management, and operations. Sam pioneered Dell’s customer-centricity strategy and customer segmentation using Six Sigma methodology.

Before Dell, Decker spent more than six years in the Bay Area leading marketing, sales and product strategy at B2B and media startups. Decker has authored two books on word of mouth marketing, serves on the digital advisory board for P&G, served on the board of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), and posts occasionally at deckermarketing.com or @samdecker.

Eric Falcao, Co-founder and Director of Platform

A technologist for over 12 years, Eric loves creating and shipping software that builds value for business. Starting with a passion for computer security and networking, Eric got his first startup job at 16 working on all aspects of building one of the first broadband companies in the Los Angeles area. There, he gained practical experience in sales, support, and network engineering. Eric parlayed his early passion for technology into a BS in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine with specializations in Software Engineering, Networking and Distributed Systems.

While at UC Irvine, Eric worked his way through the ranks of an internship and began to shift focus into .NET web application development after doing stints with C++/MFC and build engineering. After college, Eric and his wife moved to Austin to pursue a better quality of life in a high tech hub. While in Austin, Eric has worked at three startups prior to founding TweetRiver (now Mass Relevance).

As Director of Platform at Mass Relevance, Eric focuses on API, scaling, data modeling, infrastructure and some product engineering when he finds time. Follow him at @efalcao

Brian Dainton, Co-founder and Director of Product

A 13-year veteran of Austin high-tech startups, Brian has taken over a dozen commercial applications from napkin sketch to production. He started programming at age 8, when he typed a game (in BASIC) from a book into his TRS-80 Color Computer II.

Brian holds a BS in Computer Science from UIUC (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Originally on UIUC’s NCSA Mosaic team (though he never knew him, Brian actually inherited Marc Andreesen’s desk), he quickly moved into web development and Java, and his dev skills took him to Austin, TX. There, he wrote and shipped multiple products for Trilogy, a dotcom boom-era software powerhouse.

Later Brian led development projects and teams at allmystuff, Optive Research (bootstrapped & acquired), and then went to FiveRuns, where Brian made his transition from Java to Ruby and Rails. In 2009, Brian went from FiveRuns to PeopleAdmin, where he moved a self-hosted 9-year-old Java SaaS application to Ruby, Rails, and the cloud.

Outside of Mass Relevance, Brian’s most ambitious project is raising Noah and Luca, his two boys, with his beautiful and patient wife, Vanessa. Brian is a grammar fiend, agonizing over words, and he loves poker, leisure sports, Las Vegas, and a good homebrew. Follow him at @bdainton

Eric Freedman, Creative Director

Eric Freedman is a Creative Director who specializes in user interface and user experience design. He joins Mass Relevance after 12 years at frog design leading multi-disciplinary creative teams. He focused on the creation of design solutions across a broad spectrum of platforms and touch points while contributing to studio management and business development. Eric’s approach to interface design finds the right balance between user and business goals, innovation and technical reality.

One of Eric’s key clients over the past 2 years was Hewlett-Packard. He was the creative lead for the HP account and focused on the consumer products division. A notable success is the recently released TouchSmart All-in-One PC software experience.

While at frog he worked on and led large-scale web design efforts for Dell, T-Mobile and Microsoft. He has done Mobile UI/UX programs for Alltel, Motorola and Bell Canada in addition to numerous, consumer, enterprise and embedded UI software projects.

Prior to joining frog, Eric focused on brand, print and package design with Mires-Ball in San Diego, CA.

Jon Driscoll, VP of Sales and Client Operations

Prior to joining Mass Relevance Jon was Vice President of Strategic Account Sales at Convio. Convio helps non-profits such as, LiveStrong, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital use technology to build enduring relationships with their constituents. He spent 10+ years at Convio helping the company grow from under $1 million in revenue to over $75 million. In running the strategic account sales team his focus was on leading the enterprise sales team, navigating complex multi-million dollar deals comprised of both recurring software licenses as well as a multitude of value add services.

Before Convio Jon spent 8 years in the High Tech Software Industry with Trilogy Software and its spin off pcOrder.com where he was a founding member and focused on running several different business units. pcOrder.com delivered solutions to the computer distribution channel that helped drive efficiencies in quoting, pricing and configuring of computers and their peripherals. Clients included manufacturers such as Compaq and Hewlett Packard, distributors such as Ingram Micro and Tech Data, and hundreds of computer resellers across the country.

Jon is a graduate of the University of Texas Austin with a bachelors degree in Finance and has been lucky enough to live in Austin ever since. He enjoys living an active life style and loves being around his two young sons.