Business Team

Paul Walborsky brings two decades of entrepreneurial, financial, and executive expertise to GigaOM. A former Wall Street executive and founder of two companies, Paul has the unique ability to grow a disruptive business idea into a highly successful company. Prior to GigaOM, Paul founded WorldStreet Corporation, a collaborative, peer-to-peer communication platform for the financial services industry acquired by Thomson Financial in 2002. He has served as an advisor/investor to numerous companies, including Mobilocity (acquired by Qualcomm), Starmine (acquired by Thomson Reuters), Peanut Labs (acquired by eRewards), Santa.com and Group47.

Paul has raised more than $100 million in venture capital funds for startups and grown startups from the ground up. He has experience working with top-tier venture funds, establishing strategic alliances, acquiring customers, building revenues, creating marketable products, and disrupting established markets. Prior to his entrepreneurial career, Paul held senior positions at major Wall Street firms including Swiss Bank, Lehman Brothers and ING Barings. He holds an M.A. in economics and finance from Brandeis University.

Andrea is a seasoned marketing executive with over 20 years of experience and a proven track record of helping to start and grow successful businesses. Andrea was most recently VP of marketing for Monster.com’s student focused sites: MonsterCollege and FastWeb, as well as the MonsterCommunities. She has been a founding partner in several successful start-ups including Student Advantage (SA) and Crimson & Brown Associates (CBA). As a founding partner of SA, she helped take the company public from its initial start-up phase and helped to grow the company from 10 to over 500 employees, with revenue of over $30 million. As president of CBA, Andrea grew the company from one to 14 employees, with revenues of $3 million. She was instrumental in the sale of the company to Kaplan, a Washington Post company. Auny has provided marketing consulting services to a multitude of companies including LinkedIn, GigaOM, VISA, Dancing Deer Baking Co., The S Factor and Starving Students Moving Company. Andrea was born in Cambridge, MA and raised in Boston, MA and in Tokyo, Japan. She received a Bachelor’s of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania.

David has been following the intersection of technology, media and consumer behavior for 20+ years at GigaOM Pro, Jupiter Research, IDC and Forrester. He oversees the GigaOM Pro research agenda, manages the analyst network, and coordinates with GigaOM events and editorial. At Jupiter, David led digital media and marketing research, and acted as vice president for research development. At Forrester, he worked with marketing leaders to refine their interactive strategies, and at IDC he was the lead Microsoft and consumer Internet analyst. David has spoken at major industry events such as E3, Digital Music Forum East, Digital Hollywood, the Inverge conference, and Software Marketing Perspectives. He is frequently quoted in the press and has appeared on ABC World News Tonight, ESPN and NPR.

Asanka leads the team in developing GigaOM’s Account Management and Client Services practice. He brings more than a decade of business development, technology, and executive expertise in providing the best in class service to GigaOM’s clients.Prior to taking on this role, Asanka led GigaOM’s technology team launching new products and building better user experiences, as VP of Product. Before joining GigaOM, in varying roles including consulting, engineering, business development and sales, Asanka pursued a career helping build entrepreneurial companies such as ArcGate and Motive (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent). He holds a MPA degree from Harvard Kennedy School and a MSc in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin.

Alison has over 18 years’ experience in the technology media business. Prior to GigaOM, she co-founded Songcrusader, a music-licensing platform. In 2008, she founded Silicon Valley Rocks!, a benefit concert for Music in Schools Today featuring bands that use technology and geeks to make music. From 2003 until 2007, she was president and co-founder of Dealmaker Media, producer of the Under the Radar startup showcase. Alison also served as vice president of events for Red Herring magazine and spent four years in various roles at Ziff-Davis. Before moving to San Francisco, she was health and beauty editor for Boulevard magazine in Paris, France. Alison graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in international relations and French from Scripps College in Claremont, CA.

Surj has been working in digital media since 1993 when he began his career at the BBC, programming laser discs. He was also part of the team that built the original BBC web site. In later years, he formed an award-winning digital design agency in London, helped establish BBC Imagineering, studied at the MIT Media Laboratory in the Object-Based Media group, and became an Imagineer at the France Telecom/Orange advanced research lab in Cambridge, Mass. Surj is responsible for turning GigaOM’s editorial insight into industry-leading global technology events. He lives with his young family in Portland, Oregon.

Prior to GigaOM, Ernie was executive editor of paidContent and ContentNext Media, which he joined in 2008 as managing editor. He also served as deputy editor in the Media and Technology Group at The Wall Street Journal, where he helped launch two new sections of the paper — Personal Journal and the Saturday edition of Weekend Journal. Prior to that, Ernie was based in Hong Kong for Dow Jones, where he was the Page One editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal. He started his career as a reporter and editor at The Associated Press.

Mike has more than 20 years experience in the technology media sector. He began his career at IDG in 1992 working for Publish magazine. Mike was the 10th employee at Red Herring magazine and, as West Coast advertising director, went on to help build Red Herring Communications into one of the more successful media companies of that decade. He later helped launch AlwaysOn and was GigaOM’s sixth employee, joining in 2007.

Raza is a 25-year of the digital media industry. He’s managed development of a range of products from hardware to desktop/mobile software to web. He is a respected industry expect in video/music technologies and particularly in information architecture and metadata. He was previously CTO and co-founder of TuneUp Media where he built the award-winning TuneUp plug-in for iTunes. He has consulted on product definition and development for Sony/Gracenote, Rovi/AMG, Motorola, TDK Electronics and many others. He has also architected various industry standards for music and audiobooks for the Consumer Electronics Association. He started his career with a 12-year stint at Intel Corporation where he worked on ground-breaking video compression algorithms and started Intel’s Developer Relations Group. Raza holds a BSEE degree from SUNY Stony Brook.