Kevin Merritt

Current

President & CEO at Socrata

Past

Director of Operations at Microsoft
Vice President, Archiving and Compliance at FrontBridge Technologies, Inc
Founder, President & CEO at MessageRite, Inc.

Chief Information Officer at Smith Barney

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Kevin Merritt’s Summary

Before founding Socrata (formerly blist), in 2002 I founded MessageRite, a web-based email archiving software developer and service provider. In 2004 FrontBridge Technologies acquired MessageRite and I became VP of Archiving and Compliance and functioned as CTO of the archiving service. In 2005 Microsoft acquired FrontBridge and moved the 150-person company, including me, to the Seattle area. At Microsoft I initially served as a Software Architect and ultimately as Director of Operations.

At heart I'm a software entrepreneur with a passion and focus on making customers elated by delivering great software as a service.

I'm interested in meeting people who bring unique perspective and skills and can apply them to helping build Socrata. I'm also interested in technology, startups, angel investing and the startup community in and around the Seattle area. If you are in the Seattle area and/or doing interesting things with technology, feel free to get in touch with me.

Kevin Merritt’s Experience

President & CEO

Socrata

(Computer Software industry)

January 2007 — Present (3 years )

Socrata is making data social. Visit us at http://www.socrata.com.
Director of Operations

Microsoft

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; MSFT; Computer Software industry)

August 2005 — October 2006 (1 year 3 months)

I was Director of Operations for Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services, where I led a group of bright, capable and creative systems engineers, system administrators and network analysts in providing a robust, stable, scalable computing infrastructure processing upwards of 5 billion emails each month.
Vice President, Archiving and Compliance

FrontBridge Technologies, Inc

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)

August 2004 — August 2005 (1 year 1 month)

I oversaw the email archiving and message continuity services for FrontBridge, serving as CTO, technical-sales evangelist, etc. During the one year between FrontBridge's acquisition of MessageRite and its sale to Microsoft, we increased customer count from about 50 customers to more than 500.
Founder, President & CEO

MessageRite, Inc.

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)

November 2002 — August 2004 (1 year 10 months)

Among the many interesting day-to-day responsibilities, my role was to set the business vision and technology direction for the company. I also enjoyed the evangelical aspects of my job - telling the world why MessageRite is the neatest company you just heard about. Between founding MessageRite in 2002 and successfully negotiating its acquisition by FrontBridge Technologies in 2004, I led the development team, designed the product, raised capital and signed up our first 50 or so customers.
Chief Information Officer

Smith Barney

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; C; Investment Banking industry)

September 1996 — November 2002 (6 years 3 months)

I joined The Geneva Companies as Director of Information Technology in September 1996 where I architected Prospector, a purpose-built CRM system for the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) industry. I assembled a 12-person team that successfully developed Prospector, allowing Geneva to increase its M&A transaction throughput from 800 transactions per year to more than 1700 (without incremental professional staff). Promoted to Chief Technology Officer (CTO), in addition to building Prospector, I ran a 20-person IT and telecom organization, guiding its transformation from least to most respected group within the organization. In February 2001, Citigroup subsidiary Smith Barney acquired The Geneva Companies. I became a group CIO at Smith Barney before leaving in late 2002 to start MessageRite.

Additional Information

Kevin Merritt’s Websites:

Kevin Merritt’s Interests:

Government 2.0, entrepreneurship, startups, boating, massively scalable systems software, data mining and analysis, commodity storage, distributed computing, distributed file systems, network file systems, web 2.0, AJAX, application architecture, wine, running.