Brian Link

Current

CEO at Toobla
Public Speaker, Social Media / Web 2.0 at thoughtLEADERS, LLC
Partner at weBuild, LLC

CEO and Owner at BE Interactive Consulting
Founder at Columbus Tech Life

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Past

VP of Technology at Digg.com
Program Manager at Avanade
Technology Advocate and .NET Evangelist at NSB Group

Senior Architect at Centric Consulting
Principal Solution Manager at Novell
Principal / Architect / Senior Developer at Cambridge Technology Partners

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3 more...

Education

Boston University

Recommended

6 people have recommended Brian

Connections

500+ connections

Industry

Internet

Brian Link’s Summary

Brian is a software technology executive, passionate technologist and creative, lateral thinker who loves building things. With over 17 years working in technology and consulting, he was most recently the technology executive for Digg.com, driving the growth in the company from 200 thousand to 3.5 million users, from 40 million to 250 million pageviews a month, from 10 to 80 employees and to over 35 million unique visitors a month, making it one of the most highly trafficked websites in the world.

At Digg, Brian led the engineering team and grew it from 3 to 20 developers and became an expert in adapting process changes for a rapidly evolving technical team. He crafted a custom Agile/Scrum software methodology that scales both the work and the organization itself going forward. Additionally, Brian established and built the QA and R&D teams; creating test-driven processes to integrate QA into the software lifecycle; and building an R&D team that is actively involved in the product roadmap, contributing complex algorithms and prototyping exploratory features that become part of Digg.

Prior to Digg, Brian spent most of his career at Cambridge Technology Partners where he delivered over 20 full life-cycle custom software development projects. His experience includes architectural leadership, project and program management and five years in client delivery management where he was ultimately responsible for all of the projects and accounts in the Midwest.

Brian Link’s Specialties:

Social Media, Agile Software Development Processes, Web 2.0, Consulting, Systems Integration

Brian Link’s Experience

CEO

Toobla

(Privately Held; Internet industry)

February 2009 — Present (10 months)

Toobla is a visual bookmarking service that automatically collects your bookmarks and favorites from around the web and makes it easier to organize, enjoy and share your favorite stuff. Toobla collects your favorite web sites, videos, images, documents, games, music and widgets in online folders that can be broadcast publicly or privately via Twitter and email using short URLs, blogs and social networks via embed technology, or easily integrated with your Facebook news feed.
Public Speaker, Social Media / Web 2.0

thoughtLEADERS, LLC

(Internet industry)

2009 — Present (less than a year)
Partner

weBuild, LLC

(Privately Held; Venture Capital & Private Equity industry)

January 2009 — Present (11 months)

weBuild is a web and mobile startup company accelerator deploying a development-for-equity investment model. Representing Technology and Product Strategy as a virtual executive and advisor to portfolio companies.
CEO and Owner

BE Interactive Consulting

(Internet industry)

October 2008 — Present (1 year 2 months)

Strategic Internet, Social Media and Agile Process Consultant. Currently working with a successful Internet start-up in Columbus, Ohio, helping to define their social media strategy and roadmap for web2.0 feature adoption.
Founder

Columbus Tech Life

(Internet industry)

October 2008 — Present (1 year 2 months)

One of the key organizers of a grassroots group fostering greater culture and passion for Social Media, Internet, Web and other cutting edge technology, ultimately leading to increased innovation. Columbus Tech Life encourages our tribe to connect, learn and grow by binding existing groups together, creating local online social spaces and organizing in person events.
VP of Technology

Digg.com

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

April 2006 — October 2008 (2 years 7 months)

* Executive of the Engineering, QA and R&D teams
* Responsible for all development activities
* Drove process changes to evolve Digg from a dynamic, flexible 3 person team to a more segmented 9 person team to a fully organized and distributed 17 person agile team.
* Crafted Agile/Scrum practices
* Established the QA dept
* Developed expertise and processes around unit testing, load testing, automation and regression testing
* Built R&D dept
* Created various solutions that drive the algorithms behind Digg (diversity measures, promotion algorithm logic, duplicate detection, story clustering, recommendation systems, and user behavior modeling)
* Implemented algorithms including known principles such as Jaccard coefficients, Eigenvector centrality, Locality Sensitive Hashing and various clustering techniques including k-means and hierarchical dendrograms
Program Manager

Avanade

(Privately Held; 1001-5000 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

November 2005 — March 2006 (5 months)

Senior project manager. Large Microsoft project delivery focus. Led team of 20 while tracking project estimates and actuals.
Technology Advocate and .NET Evangelist

NSB Group

(Public Company; 501-1000 employees; Computer Software industry)

November 2004 — November 2005 (1 year 1 month)

Strategic architect and technology advocate for all product lines and enterprise solutions. Responsible for articulating the architectural strategy, product interoperability, and describing the vision for leveraging Microsoft .NET.

Responsible for the relationship with Microsoft and for six software solutions which comprised NSB’s Connected Retailer suite of software which provides an integrated technology solution for retailers. NSB was one of the top five software providers in the retail software industry.
Senior Architect

Centric Consulting

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

September 2004 — November 2004 (3 months)

Worked to help drive business development, designed and architect systems, focused on the Microsoft relationship and key member of the strategic management team.
Principal Solution Manager

Novell

(Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; NOVL; Computer Software industry)

2001 — 2004 (3 years )

Responsible for managing customer relationships, contracts and all project teams in the Midwest. Wrote statements of work, negotiated with clients, actively managed and staffed teams. Was ultimately responsible for success of project delivery and profitability.
Principal / Architect / Senior Developer

Cambridge Technology Partners

(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; CATP; Information Technology and Services industry)

June 1992 — August 2004 (12 years 3 months)

Started my career with a deep technical background, having held Architect, PM, Technical Team Leader, and DBA positions on 20+ large projects doing custom development, Internet and client-server rapid application development, leading teams of 35 or more to on-time, on-budget delivery. Led each custom software, system integration project through design, development, testing and rollout using a large variety of technologies: VB, ASP, C++, SQL Server, Microsoft Site Server Commerce Edition, CORBA, and Oracle. Clients included Microsoft, Charles Schwab, Pacific Bell, Union Pacific, Internet start-ups and other industry leaders.

Brian Link’s Education

Boston University

BA , Computer Science , September 1988 — May 1992

Activities and Societies:

Sigma Chi

Additional Information

Brian Link’s Interests:

I’m an ex-executive of Digg.com and a passionate technologist, current entrepreneur, social networking consultant, Columbus community builder, Internet startup enthusiast, easy to please movie lover, science fiction action figure collector, consummate Scrabble player, epic fantasy novel writer, an occasional poet, too-infrequent soccer and racquetball player, optimistic lateral thinker, fairly non-political and yet very opinionated, seat-of-the-pants traveler and heartfelt family man.