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Management Team Bios
Randy Ullrich
Founder, President & CEO
FiveSprockets’ Founder, Randy Ullrich, is a 20+ year software/web veteran with both early-stage and mature-stage company experience, as well as two successful M&A exits under his belt. Spending the first half of his career as a software engineer positioned Randy well for the executive positions that followed, including President & CEO of a 100-person software/web consultancy (SEA) and CTO of a data-integration product company (Crossflo Systems). Randy worked for Accenture on-site at Siebel Systems in Silicon Valley, helping to establish and run Accenture’s first Siebel Solution Center, which became a model for other solution centers industry wide. Randy left Accenture to join SEA, and then helped lead SEA to more than 10 times growth in revenue, clients, and employees between 1996 and 2000. He shepherded the sale of SEA to NextLeft, a full-services digital consultancy, and was retained to run NextLeft’s San Diego office. More recently, Randy was CTO of Crossflo Systems, a data modeling and integration company where Randy led the development Crossflo’s flagship product called DataExchange, a web-based, opensource/XML data-sharing platform. Crossflo was recently sold to Patriot Scientific for a sizable revenue multiple. Over the last several years, Randy has also led consulting engagements ranging from investor due diligences of technology companies to Software as a Service (SaaS) / Cloud Computing assessments and deployments.
But professional career aside, Randy’s had a long-time passion for film. The son of a SAG actress in Hollywood, Randy was an aspiring actor as a kid and made a film when he was 10. More recently, Randy wrote two full-featured screenplays and was involved with several short films, including as assistant director of an ON THE LOT submission. His first ever screenplay, FRUGAL, was a 2005 Fade-In quarterfinalist and also got positive reads in Hollywood. He was polishing his second screenplay when he had the idea for FiveSprockets.
Armed with his vision of a holistic, collaborative approach to all five phases of media production, and backed by a technical understanding of what a multi-user, cloud-computing approach to media production could do, Ullrich recruited an all-star team, raised an Angel round of capital, and launched FiveSprockets into Beta in September of 2008.
Educationally, Randy holds a B.S. in Computer Science and an MBA in Finance, both from San Diego State University. He was a 2005-graduate of Dov Simens’ Film School in Santa Monica, and has completed screenwriting coursework from UCLA’s Dean of Screenwriting, Richard Walter, UCSD, and ASA (American Screenwriter’s Association) Conferences.
Dave Meagher
Co-Founder, CTO
With more than 15 year of experience, FiveSprockets’ CTO Dave Meagher has a proven track record of architecting, building, and managing award winning web-based software products. Dave is co-author of several patents within the Internet collaboration space. Driven by a passion for start-up life, he has been a serial entrepreneur since the late 90’s. It was this deep experience with collaborative software and his entrepreneurial drive that made him such a strong fit for FiveSprockets; media production is, after all, a collaborative endeavor.
In 1997, Dave co-founded collaboration software startup Inovie Software, where he was VP of Engineering. Inovie’s product TeamCenter is a web-based project management and collaboration suite and was awarded Editor’s choice by PC Magizine. Inovie software was bootstrapped from a garage to 120+ enterprise customers and multimillion dollar annual revenue within three years. Inovie Software was acquired by SDRC, a public software company in the PLM space.
After Inovie Software, Dave Founded LogicTrader, a quantitative investment advisor firm. Logictrader’s core software product was an Internet based trading platform to quantitatively trade equities for the firm’s client accounts. Dave put Logictrader on the back burner to join FiveSprockets in late 2007.
Dave holds a B.S. in Computer Science from San Diego State University and a Series 65 Registered Investment Advisor license.
Board of Advisors
Peter Csathy
CEO, Sorenson Media
Peter Csathy is a seasoned digital media and technology executive with an unbroken track record of company successes in emerging growth, growth, and Fortune 500 companies. Currently President & CEO of Sorenson Media, Csathy's last three companies were sold, respectively, to Logitech, Yahoo!, and AOL. Earlier in his career he held senior management positions at Universal Studios and New Line Cinema. Csathy is a graduate of Harvard Law School (J.D.) and the University of Minnesota.
Michael Jewison
COO, Yorktown Films
A 20-year veteran of the film industry, Michael Jewison is COO of Yorktown Productions, the boutique production company he runs with his father, Director Norman Jewison. With producing credits on "The Hurricane" starring Denzel Washington, "Only You" with Robert Downey Jr. and Marisa Tomei, and "In Country" with Bruce Willis, Jewison is involved with every aspect of film production from script development to shooting second unit and running post production. He currently has several feature and television projects in various stages of development.