Mark Sears
Founder and CEO
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Mark Sears
Mark Sears
Founder and CEO

Mark began his career as a software developer, working for Sun Microsystems and later growing and leading tech startups in Canada and the United States. On a visit to Nepal, he saw firsthand that talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not.

In 2010, he founded CloudFactory to connect one million talented people to meaningful work so that together we can earn, learn, and serve our way to become leaders worth following. Mark has led CloudFactory from startup to growth, including $78 million in venture capital investment and expansion across four continents.

Mark is a speaker on artificial intelligence, workforce strategy, the future of work, scaling corporate culture, and entrepreneurship.

 
Cary Smith
Chief Financial Officer
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Cary Smith
Cary Smith
Chief Financial Officer

Cary has 30 years of experience in finance and accounting and a love for fast-paced, high-growth, international technology companies. He was CFO for JBoss, a technology startup with a distributed workforce spanning the globe. He raised capital and led finance to grow the company from USD $1M in sales to $17M in 30 months, culminating in an acquisition by Red Hat for $370 million.

Prior to that, Cary was Chief Accounting Officer for EarthLink, where he helped grow the company to $1.4+B in annual sales. He held roles at PaySys, a global enterprise systems provider, and began his career with Ernst & Young. Not your average certified public accountant, Cary is an explorer who finds adventure and creates it where it can’t be found.
Lisbi Abraham
Chief Delivery Officer
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Lisbi Abraham
Lisbi Abraham
Chief Delivery Officer

Lisbi is an operations and delivery executive with 30+ years of experience growing startups and established enterprises, building for scale while maintaining operational excellence. He built the learning, technology and success organizations at Andela, where he grew the company from 65 employees to over 1,300 in 3.5 years, with revenues doubling each year.

He ran the India delivery organization and all solution development for Lionbridge Technologies' global enterprise solutions division, as their Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Vice President. He created the offshore product development practice for Alliance Global Services. Prior to that, Lisbi was a divisional CTO for major divisions at American International Group, including their domestic brokerage group and financial services division.

Lisbi earned his bachelor of science in computer science engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and his master’s degree in business administration in management and marketing from the Stern School of Business at New York University.

 
Morgan Gebhardt
Chief Revenue Officer
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Morgan Gebhardt
Morgan Gebhardt
Chief Revenue Officer

Morgan has 30 years of experience in the technology world, mainly leading go-to-market teams and strategies for high-growth startups. He was previously a Vice President & Principal Executive at IPsoft (Amelia Corp.), where he led strategic revenue initiatives and business lines across the globe. Before that, he spent seven years as a Divisional Technology Head at Macy's.

At the age of 20, Morgan co-founded a Fintech company that provided real-time stock quotes and a news platform for individual investors and small broker-dealers.

Morgan is a customer-first, "people-over-everything" leader. He believes that the greatest joy comes from celebrating the success of others. He's also a classically-trained percussionist and a certified logger aka lumberjack.
Keisha McKenzie
Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer
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Keisha McKenzie
Keisha McKenzie
Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer

Keisha has 20+ years of sales and marketing experience at Fortune 500 companies. She was Vice President of Marketing for IBM’s Cloud Business in North America. Prior to that, she spent eight years at J.P. Morgan as a Vice President in the institutional sales business, where she had responsibility for new business development and relationship management for major institutional clients.

Keisha holds bachelor of arts degrees in history and psychology from Kenyon College and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Notre Dame.
Pieter Nel
Chief Technology Officer
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Pieter Nel
Pieter Nel
Chief Technology Officer

Pieter leads the product and technology teams in building CloudFactory's human-in-the-loop AI platform supporting clients' AI training data needs. He has more than 20 years of experience, across three continents, in technology strategy and software engineering management.

Previously, Pieter was CTO at Ocrolus, responsible for scaling its human-in-the-loop AI document processing product. Prior, he was at McKinsey & Co, advising clients on AI strategy and co-authoring many of the firm's AI research studies. He has also served as COO of mobile live streaming company YouNow, advised Tencent on the launch and growth of its mobile products in Africa, and was CTO at MXit, the world's first mobile instant messaging company, where he oversaw a team that grew the company to 40 million users.

Pieter holds an MBA from MIT, where he was a Sloan Fellow, as well as a M.Sc.Eng and B.Eng., both in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, where his research was on machine learning, and artificial intelligence applied to speech recognition. He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and draws leadership inspiration from his time as a technical mountain rescue volunteer, yacht skipper, and pilot.

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