Brian Kissel
Brian holds a BS in mechanical engineering (top 10%) from the US Naval Academy and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Brian spent 6 years as a Division Officer in the US Navy Submarine Force in Charleston, SC and San Diego, CA. While a navy lieutenant, he was selected as one of four members of a team that accompanied Dr. Robert Ballard from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute during the first exploration of the RMS Titanic on the ocean floor.
Brian is passionate about leveraging technology to improve satisfaction and productivity of individuals, groups, and enterprises. He's a fan of Guy Kawasaki's "surprise and delight" customer experience mantra, and is a practitioner and advocate of agile product development as well as the user experience (UX) approach. Brian is SVP of Product at Matterport, an immersive media technology company that builds 3D media solutions used in a variety of sectors. The firm has built the first end-to-end media platform that allows users to easily create, modify, navigate, and build on digital representations of real places.
Before Matterport, Brian was at Sysomos as Executive VP of Product. Using contextual text analytics and data-mining technology, the Sysomos social intelligence engine collects data from blogs, Twitter, social networks, message boards, wikis, and major news sources and integrates all of that data into one user interface. Earlier, Brian was at 247, where he led the global product management organization in defining and delivering exceptional cross-channel (web, voice, chat, mobile), big data predictive, analytics-based consumer sales and support experiences. 247 provides cloud-based software and services for consumers to connect with companies to get things done, and helps companies anticipate what consumers want, simplify interactions, and learn from those interactions.
Brian's two decades of experience spans a broad range of technology organizations. He was Business Group CIO and VP IT at Juniper Networks, helping drive the IT transformation for this market-leading company. Before that he was the CEO of Janrain, a user management platform for the social web, powering social media solutions across 350,000 websites. Janrain was also the driving force behind OpenID, operating myOpenID.com. Brian also served as Chairman of the Board of the OpenID Foundation.
Earlier Brian was the SVP Electronic Banking Solutions at CheckFree (acquired by Fiserv). He served his fellowship at Blue Chip Venture Company, was CEO of Paraform, an engineering software company that was acquired by the Belgian firm Metris, and served as VP Marketing at Oblix (acquired by Oracle).
Brian is a member of Kauffman Fellows Class 7 and served his fellowship under John McIlwraith at Blue Chip Venture Company in Cincinnati, OH.