Management
Jim Barnett
CEO and Chairman
Jim co-founded Turn in 2005, bringing his extensive experience in online advertising and search to create a next generation market for online advertising. Most recently, Jim was President of Overture Search, a division of Overture Services, Inc. He joined Overture via its acquisition of AltaVista Company, where he was President and CEO. In this role, he led the company's highly successful turnaround and sale to Overture.
Read More
Jim was also President of MyFamily.com, the parent company of Ancestry.com, and President and CEO of ThirdAge Media, which was acquired by MyFamily.com. Prior to that, Jim was President and CEO of Infogrammes North America, a leading global publisher of video games and entertainment software. For five years, he was also Chairman, President and CEO of Accolade Inc, Infogrammes' predecessor company.
Jim has served on the boards of several public and private companies. He is currently on the boards of Syndero Inc. and Sojern Inc. and was most recently Chairman of SideStep Inc. He is also on the advisory boards of Trusted ID and Cellfire and on the management board of Stanford Graduate School of Business. Jim received a BA, MBA and J.D. from Stanford University.
Bill Demas
President and COO
Bill Demas was most recently President and CEO of MokaFive, a next generation desktop virtualization company and was responsible for launching the company, leading overall strategy and guiding day-to-day operations. Prior to MokaFive, Demas was senior vice president and general manager of the Yahoo Publisher Network Group (formerly Overture). While at Overture, Demas helped guide the company to revenues of $1 billion leading to its acquisition by Yahoo in 2003.
Read More
Before Overture, Demas served as executive vice president of product development and marketing for Vividence Corporation (acquired by Keynote). Previously he held senior customer product and enterprise business roles at Microsoft, spanning Encarta Encyclopedia to SQL Server. Demas began his career in technology at IBM in sales. Demas serves on the board of Turn and on the advisory boards of DeviceVM and Digital Performance. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and bachelor's degrees in computer science and organizational behavior and management from Brown University.
Dominic Bennett
Vice President of Engineering
Dominic is an expert in data mining, marketing analytics, ad selection, and behavioral targeting in very large database (>40TB) environments. In addition, he brings to Turn established management skills in product design, architecture, development, and QA. Before joining Turn, he served as Vice President, Engineering and Analytics at Claria, where he led engineering teams and was the primary inventor of eight patents in ad optimization, behavioral search, and click-stream analysis.
Read More
Before Claria, Dominic was Group Director, DB Marketing at Wunderman Cato Johnson, where he was responsible for the Sony, Citibank, and Pepsi accounts. Previously, he was Director of Quantitative Analysis at the Orvis Company. Dominic holds a bachelor's degree in Math and Computer Science from the University of Connecticut and a master's degree in statistics from Yale University.
Dennis Jang
Vice President of Finance and Administration
Dennis has nearly 20 years of financial and administrative operations experience at online advertising, e-commerce, biotech, consumer software, PC peripherals, and semi-conductor equipment companies. Dennis specializes in high tech start-ups and played significant roles in the initial public offerings for two of the previous companies for which he worked.
Read More
For six years prior to joining Turn, Dennis was the Senior Director of Finance and Administration and Corporate Controller for Claria Corporation, one of the pioneers in online advertising. Dennis was responsible for designing and implementing the financial and operational infrastructures at Claria, allowing it to achieve exponential growth over five years. Dennis received a bachelor of science degree in finance from San Jose State University.
Maureen Little
Vice President of Business Development
Maureen comes to Turn after 10 years in online advertising with an expertise in publisher-side ad solutions. Prior to joining Turn, Maureen spent over 5 years at Vibrant Media as VP of Business Development. As one of the first US employees, Maureen was responsible for overseeing Vibrant's US distribution strategy for both branded publishers and a network of over 3,000 partners. Maureen was integral in the launch of Vibrant's in-text advertising products and maintained and expanded exclusive long-term contracts with key partners leading to rapid growth and increased profits.
Read More
Prior to Vibrant Media, Maureen was a Senior Sales Executive at Register.com working with Fortune 500 companies to build Register's presence in the domain category. Maureen also spent over 3 years at RealNames as a Channel Development Director, building sales programs and automated reseller tools for the largest Domain companies in Europe and the US. Maureen holds a bachelor's degree in International Economics from the University of California at Davis.
Hugh McGoran
Vice President of Sales
Involved in interactive marketing since 1995, Hugh is an industry veteran and has extensive experience growing successful sales organizations. He comes to Turn from Peer39 where as SVP of Sales he played an integral role in establishing Semantic Targeting as a viable media option within the industry. Prior to Peer39, Hugh served as the Vice President of Eastern Advertising Sales at Tacoda, Inc. where he helped transition the company from a leading advertising technology provider to a major Behavioral Targeting advertising network. Following Tacoda's acquisition by AOL/Time Warner in 2007, McGoran led the Tacoda sales integration into AOL's Platform A.
Read More
Before Tacoda, Hugh was with Knight Ridder Digital for nearly nine years and held positions of increasing responsibility related to Internet advertising and business development for more than 100 regional and vertical websites. His most recent position there was Vice President, National Advertising, Real Cities Network. Hugh came to Knight Ridder from his previous role as Director of Interactive Advertising at Lorel Marketing in Philadelphia, PA. Hugh holds a BFA from Temple University.
Xuhui Shao
Chief Technology Officer
Xuhui brings to Turn over 10 years of experience in analytical product development, machine learning methodology, statistical learning theory, advanced experiment design, nonlinear optimization, software engineering, and high performance computation. Prior to joining Turn, Xuhui was the Vice President of Analytics at ID Analytics. At ID Analytics, Xuhui led the teams responsible for developing core technology and advanced analytical solutions for identity fraud.
Read More
For the last ten years, he has been doing research and development in machine learning and computational intelligence in both industry and academia. Prior to ID Analytics, Xuhui was a key member of the Falcon Technology team for payment card fraud detection and a Lead Scientist in the Technology Development Group at HNC Software (now Fair Isaac).
Xuhui is the lead inventor of multiple pending patents and is a recognized expert in the development and application of behavioral targeting design and analysis. He received his bachelor's and master's of science degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, and his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota.
Philip Smolin
Vice President of Product and Marketing
Philip has 13 years experience in leading hosted software development, and has specialized in online advertising systems since 1997. With product director positions at MatchLogic, Excite@Home and PayChoice, Philip has developed industry-leading 3rd party ad serving platforms, rich media tools and CPM yield management systems for Internet portals.
Read More
Philip holds a bachelor's degree in social sciences from the University at Buffalo, and an MBA from Columbia University and the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley.
See our Board of Directors