Management Team
CEO - Matthew Work
Matthew co-founded Discovery Mining with a string of Internet successes to his credit. Since receiving his MBA from Columbia in 1995, Matthew has worked at EarthWeb, Inc. in New York City where he oversaw venture financing from Warburg, Pincus and subsequent IPO led By JP Morgan. The EarthWeb IPO resulted in the Nasdaq's largest IPO single-day percentage point gain, and spawned a wave of Tech IPOs.
After EarthWeb, Matt joined Alexa Internet to head a new web behavior research division. Alexa's unique data and data processing capabilities led to its purchase by Amazon.com for $250 million in stock in 1999. As part of Amazon.com, Matt served the Amazon.com management team with strategic analysis utilizing the Alexa clickstreams and the 200-terabyte cluster computer.
In 2001, Matt took the entire 12-person research team to join a Boston research start up, Compete, Inc., a Charles River Ventures Company. Matt held the title of Chief Strategy Officer for Compete, Inc.
Matt graduated from the University of Wisconsin and has an MBA from
Columbia University.
President & CFO - Leslie Brennan
Prior to co-founding Discovery Mining, Leslie Brennan was a founder of Medical Arts and Ventures, Inc. a company working with life science and technology clients to optimize the value of ideas and innovations. Leslie served as Chief Executive Officer of an early stage mucosal healthcare company in Ireland, which secured seed funding from Irish government funding agencies, and negotiated a strategic collaboration partnership in the US. Leslie served as Managing Partner of BioBusiness Partners, a management consulting company, located in France, specializing in biotechnology and the life sciences, from its inception early 1994, and as Managing Partner of Business Finance Consultants, specializing in general financial management for small company start-ups, created in 1986. During this period he was Vice President Finance and Chief Financial Officer to a Canadian biotechnology company supplying biological reagents to the life sciences research market. Major accomplishments included fund raising in North America and France, acquisitions of companies in France and Canada, and the establishment of a US subsidiary in Boston, MA. Prior to 1986, Leslie held various positions in France as a senior financial executive in subsidiaries of US and UK companies. He began his career as a Chartered Accountant with Touche Ross in London, England, becoming a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.
Leslie holds a B.Sc. in Philosophy and Sociology from Bristol University,
England.
Senior Vice President, Sales - Andrew Jenks
As a co-founder of Discovery Mining, Andy brings over 10 years experience building large-scale data storage and retrieval systems. Andy has led the sales team to 1,104% growth over the last 3 years, making Discovery Mining the fastest growing e-discovery company on the 2007 Inc. 500 list. Andy has participated on many vendor panels relating to electronic discovery and is known for developing the first version of Discovery Mining's software platform.
Prior to Discovery Mining, Andy was in charge of the team at Compete, Inc. that developed the software used to analyze the click stream data of over 2 million Internet users. Also at Compete Andy was instrumental in building large-scale data search and retrieval systems, both from an architecture and software development position.
Prior to Compete, Andy worked within the research division at Alexa Internet. At Alexa Andy developed software which was used to aggregate the multi-terabyte web crawl for analytics, search, and retrieval. Alexa was subsequently acquired by Amazon.com.
Andy has a BS in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Utah.
Visit Andy's blog.
CTO - Jason Maxham
As a co-founder of Discovery Mining, Jason has been involved in large-scale cluster computing for over eight years, utilizing multi-terabyte cluster systems at Amazon.com subsidiary Alexa Internet, Compete, Inc., and the Internet Archive. At Alexa Internet, he led data mining projects on Alexa's 100TB archive of web pages and 2TB collection of web usage statistics. He extracted value from these large data sets for clients like Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon.com, helping them to tune their Internet strategies based on his analyses. As Director of Data Mining at Compete, Inc., Jason successfully managed a team of data miners charged with the task of gleaning meaningful business recommendations from web usage statistics. Employing parallel processing techniques, the team regularly completed business-critical analyses for clients on short notice from a dataset containing the clickstream data of more than 2 million web surfers. Jason has also worked on numerous projects for the Internet Archive, including preparing a copy of the Web for display in the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.
Jason has a B.S. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
COO - Jennifer Rapp
Jennifer Rapp joined Discovery Mining in 2003 as Vice President of Services and was promoted to COO in 2006. Jennifer oversees the entire customer experience for Discovery Mining, coordinating the activities of sales, project management, software and systems engineering.
Jennifer's thought leader status and knowledge plays a key role in the strength of Discovery Mining; she brings extensive management, product management and litigation document review experience to the team.
Prior to joining Discovery Mining during 2000-2003, Jennifer was the Director of Client Services at CaseCentral Inc., a San Francisco-based Electronic Discovery and Litigation Management Solutions company where she managed a team of 15. Prior to CaseCentral, she worked in several educational technology companies in Client Management and Product Management roles. In April 2008, Jennifer was elected to serve as the Assistant Director of the San Francisco Chapter of Women in eDiscovery (WiE). WiE brings together women interested in technology related to the legal industry through leadership, education and networking. Jennifer has a B.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
VP of Software Engineering - Antonis Papatsaras
Antonis joined Discovery Mining as Director of Software Engineering, with a background in Formal Specification and Design of Distributed Systems as well as several years of experience in Artificial Intelligence. Before assuming the role of Vice-President, Software Engineering, he led the team responsible for the company's unstructured data processing system.
Prior to joining Discovery Mining, Antonis was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Teesside, School of Computing, in the UK, where he taught Artificial Intelligence modules with an emphasis on Natural Language Processing, Expert Systems and Genetic Algorithms.
He successfully managed research projects in the area of Robotics and Automation funded by the European Union ERASMUS program.
Earlier at Teesside, Antonis completed his PhD, specializing in Formal Specification and Design of Safety Critical Systems, Software Security and Software Design of Distributed and Scalable Systems. In 2003, he was elected a member of the Institute of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (ILTHE) and in 2007 he achieved the status of "Fellow of the Higher Education Academy".
Antonis started his professional career in 1996, as a Programmer/Analyst at Serco Systems Ltd in the UK, working on the National Motorway Communications System 2 (NMCS2) for the Highways Agency.
Antonis holds a PhD in Formal Software Design, a BSc in Computer Science
and a Diploma in Computer Engineering.
VP
of Client Services - Phuong Palmares
Phuong Palmares joined Discovery Mining in 2005 as a Project Manager, later moved into the role of Director of Client Services, and was promoted to VP of Client Services in July 2007. Phuong supervises the Client Services group, which includes Project Managers, support and quality control team members. The Project Management group drives and coordinates client matters by working closely with clients to define processing specifications, provide training, coordinate support and quality control.
Prior to joining Discovery Mining, Phuong Palmares played a key role in client management at several technology firms including CaseCentral Inc., a San Francisco-based Electronic Discovery and Litigation Management Solutions company. Phuong joined CaseCentral in 2002 where she provided end-to-end client service support for Am Law 100 firms.
Phuong has a B.A. in Social Psychology from University of California,
Irvine.
General Manager, Europe - Gordon Lichter
Gordon is charged with introducing Discovery Mining’s leading-edge e-Discovery software and services to the European market. His responsibilities include growing all facets of the business from Sales and Marketing to Project Management and Business Development.
Gordon originally joined Discovery Mining Inc. as a Project Manager, bringing with him experience in both the legal and software industries. After working as a paralegal for O’Melveny & Myers LLP, Gordon held positions in both Professional Services and Product Management at Truis Corporation and Ebates in San Francisco. Gordon spent more than two years in the Project Management group at Discovery Mining, Inc. before accepting the role of General Manager of Discovery Mining Ltd.
Gordon received a B.A. degree in Sociology from Colgate University.
