Executive Leadership
Marc DeBevoise is an accomplished leader with wide-ranging experience in the direct-to-consumer, media, and technology industries. Marc recently led the global streaming, digital, and technology strategies and operations of ViacomCBS (now Paramount Global) as its Chief Digital Officer and CEO & President of CBS Interactive. During Marc’s leadership tenure, the company became a major player in direct-to-consumer streaming and a leading global Internet company, primarily driven by the founding and evolution of its streaming services, including Paramount+. Earlier in his career, Marc held executive positions at Starz and NBCUniversal and started his career in media and technology as an investment banker at Hambrecht & Quist and JPMorgan.
Marc also currently serves as the Vice Chairman and President of Argus Capital Corp., a tech-enabled-media focused special purpose acquisition corporation, and as Board President of The Door, a non-profit organization supporting at-risk youth in NYC.
Marc received his M.B.A. with distinction in Entertainment, Media & Technology, and Finance from New York University’s Stern School of Business and his B.A. in Economics and Computer Science from Tufts University.
Robert Noreck has more than 20 years of financial experience in a wide range of of technology and software companies. He joined Brightcove in 2011. Most recently, Mr. Noreck held positions at other Boston-based companies such as Fidelity Investments, BostonCoach, and City Year. He received his BS degree with a concentration in Finance from Binghamton University and holds an MBA from the F.W. Olin School of Business at Babson College.
Jennifer leads the marketing organization at Brightcove, encompassing product marketing, demand generation, and marketing communications, and is responsible for operational execution on a global level. Smith is an international marketing executive who brings more than 20 years of experience in global technology companies to Brightcove. She is recognized for her leadership skills in go-to-market strategy and has a proven track record of making improvements across product, sales, and marketing for public and private companies. Most recently, she served as CMO at Alfresco Software (recently acquired by Hyland), where she led the transformation of the company’s positioning from technology vendor to platform solution provider, managing all aspects of marketing.
Prior to joining Alfresco, Smith was CMO of Software AG, an enterprise software company with more than 10,000 customers in over 70 countries. Prior to that, she served as the CMO of Globoforce, and as Senior Vice President and CMO of Avid Technology and Progress Software. She also held senior marketing roles at Information Builders, PeopleSoft and Microsoft.
David is Brightcove's Chief Legal Officer. He manages the company's global legal affairs, as well as its governance, compliance, and privacy programs. David also handles the executive management of Brightcove’s Support and Customer Success organizations and leads a number of important cross-company initiatives.
David joined Brightcove in 2007 as the company's VP of Business and Legal Affairs. In addition to leading our commercial legal dealings, he was also responsible for negotiating many of the company's significant business relationships. Prior to his current role, David held the title of General Counsel and Global Privacy Officer.
Before joining Brightcove, David was a partner in the Media & IP practice of Boston law firm Prince Lobel. Before that, he was an associate at Hill & Barlow, also located in Boston. Prior to his tenure in private practice, David was a law clerk for a federal district judge in Connecticut.
David received his JD from Northeastern University School of Law and his BA in Economics from The George Washington University.
Dan Freund has more than 25 years of global leadership experience in leading commercial sales and fueling revenue growth for enterprise software companies. At Brightcove, Freund oversees all aspects of the company’s revenue performance, including managing its global sales organization and executing its go-to-market strategy. Before Brightcove, Freund served as the Chief Revenue Officer for Brandwatch, a digital consumer intelligence company. Before Brandwatch, Freund served as Chief Sales Officer for Quick Base. He spent most of his career at Oracle, where for 17 years, he held several sales leadership positions and grew its OracleDirect division from $700M to $1.2B in revenue and expanded the organization to over 2,000 team members. Freund holds an MS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and BS in Marine Engineering from Massachusetts Maritime Academy.
David leads strategy, business development, and corporate development at Brightcove.
David served as the EVP, Head of Content Strategy & Business Operations of AMC Networks where he led the strategy to accelerate AMC’s streaming business model transformation. He architected the strategy and operational roadmap to launch a suite of integrated Linear, SVOD (AMC+), and AVOD/FAST services and partnerships for B2B and DTC distribution.
Prior to his time at AMC, David served as the EVP, Corporate Strategy & Operations at WarnerMedia, and Chief Strategy Officer of TNT & TBS. At WarnerMedia he was responsible for developing the strategies and driving the roadmap planning process for a broad set of growth opportunities, including the development of the initial strategy and roadmap that would become HBO Max, as well as several acquisitions and enterprise partnership strategies in growth sectors including Esports, Audio/Podcasting, and talent monetization.
Prior to WarnerMedia, David co-founded BRAVE Ventures (acquired by Turner), a 20+ person Media/Tech/Consumer advisory and investment firm. BRAVE developed growth initiatives, strategies, business cases, and operational roadmaps for clients' including Viacom, Turner, CBS, A+E, Sony/Crackle, and Mattel. These included Turner Launchpad, an industry-leading, hundred+ million-dollar social video monetization platform for ad sales which ultimately led to Turner’s acquisition of Brave, to incubating Delmondo, a social video analytics platform acquired by Conviva.
Outside of work, David has been a big supporter of MIT’s Entrepreneurship Center having helped expand the Delta v Accelerator program from Cambridge to New York and serving as a mentor/advisor to multiple companies in the program. He also founded and chairs the Board of the RHS Ignite Foundation, a non-profit which supports High School Incubator & Accelerator programs.
Trisha Stiles has more than 20 years of experience leading human resources for Fortune 500 companies, including Tableau, a Salesforce Business Unit, CBS Interactive, and GE/NBC Universal, and she is a graduate of the GE Human Resource Leadership Program known for HR excellence. At Brightcove, Stiles oversees all aspects of human resource strategy, encompassing talent and performance management, spearheading diversity, equality, and inclusion initiatives, developing competitive people practices, and reinforcing the company’s strategic direction and business growth. Before Brightcove, Trisha served as vice president of employee success at Tableau, overseeing human resources strategy for Tableau’s global engineering, product and marketing teams. She managed equality, talent attraction, and organization strategy to bolster company growth and employee performance. Prior to Tableau, Stiles was the Head of HR for CBSI, where she helped build the culture across the CBS/CBSi brands and scaled the streaming business.
Stiles holds a MA from Teachers College of Columbia University in Organizational Psychology, Org. Development, Change Management, and Leadership, and a BA in Psychology from UC Santa Barbara.
Deb Richards leads Brightcove’s global customer success team including support, enablement, and onboarding. Richards is responsible for understanding and advocating for the needs of Brightcove global customers to ensure long-term success and retention with a focus on building and setting customer expectations for an exceptional experience.
Deb has more than 20 years of expertise in leading global customer success, retention, operations and support organizations for technology and SaaS organizations. Throughout her career, she has held global VP roles at Progress Software, Acronis, Brainshark, Tracelink and most recently Plex systems and has demonstrated success in building exceptional customer experiences.
Board of Directors
Diane Hessan is a successful entrepreneur, marketer and author. She is currently CEO of Salient Ventures, an investment and advisory company with a portfolio of angel investments focused on Boston technology companies. Prior to Salient, she was CEO of Startup Institute, which is dedicated to helping people transform their careers to succeed in the exciting innovation economy.
Diane has received many honors, including the Pinnacle Award from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, the Most Admired CEO award and Boston Power 50 award from the Boston Business Journal, Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year (National Finalist), the Northstar Award from Springboard, the Great Boston Chamber of Commerce Entrepreneur of the Year, and a range of Best Boss citations. In 2014, she was inducted into the Babson Academy of Distinguished Entrepreneurs and she received the Asper Award for Global Entrepreneurship from Brandeis.
Diane serves on the boards of Tufts University, Mass Challenge, Panera, Eastern Bank, CoachUp, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and is Special Advisor to Datapoint Capital, a leading early-stage venture firm. She received her M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and her B.A. in Economics from Tufts University. She has 2 grown daughters, and is also founder of The Sound Bytes, an a cappella group that sings about business.
Kristin Frank is a well-respected and highly seasoned media, and data industry thought leader, transformational executive, and current CEO at AdPredictive, a software company behind the industry's most powerful customer intelligence platform. Before AdPredictive, Kristin's career spanned over 23 years at Viacom, Inc., in multiple roles. Most recently, she served as COO of MTV, overseeing revenue, strategy, and operations for a $1.8B portfolio and spearheaded a turnaround, brand reinvention, digital and social media innovation, and market growth.
Prior to MTV, she served as Executive Vice President of Viacom Music and Entertainment's Connected Content Division, where she transformed consumer product, data, engineering, and content resulting in a doubling of revenue. During her time at Viacom, she also held positions as General Manager for MTV and VH1 Digital, Chief Operating Officer of LOGO TV and Regional Vice President of Content Distribution and Marketing. Kristin's career began in finance working for Heller Financial which was acquired by GE.
Kristin was honored as Variety's Power Women of New York, the Most Powerful Women in Cable, and received the Top Women in Digital: Corporate Visionary Award. Kristin currently serves as the Board Director for Gaia, Inc. and Cornerstone Capital, Inc. Formerly she served as board director at Gaiam sold to Sequential Brands in 2016. She received her BBA in Finance from the University of Iowa.
Gary Haroian brings significant senior executive and board director experience from more than three decades of service with a number of leading software and technology companies. Haroian has held numerous senior executive positions throughout his career, including serving as the chief financial officer of Bowstreet and Concord Communications and in various roles at Stratus Computer, including chief executive officer, chief operating officer and chief financial officer. In addition, he currently serves on the board of directors of Aspen Technology, and has previously served on the boards of directors of several technology companies, including PhaseForward and Unica.
Scott Kurnit is an investor and advisor focused on the digital ecosystem.
Kurnit founded and served as chairman and CEO of About, Inc. as it grew to a public market value of $1.7 billion and was the fifth largest of all Web properties. About invented or popularized important Internet staples such as blogging, content SEO and contextual pay-per-click advertising. He sold About US to Primedia for $724 million. About was then owned by the New York Times Company and IAC.
Kurnit has founded four companies, holds four patents, led the team that embedded the first Web browser into an online service, started the first Pay Per View cable network, and co-led the team that implemented the first use of national caller ID. He was also the youngest program director in the PBS system and served as program director for Qube, the world’s first fully interactive cable system.
He was president of Showtime Event Television when it generated the largest one night gross in the entertainment business and aired the first rock concert (broadcast in 70 countries) from the former Soviet Union.
He has been a filmmaker, TV director, station program manager, marketer, and CEO. He has worked at the highest levels of Warner, Viacom, News Corp., PBS, IBM, and MCI companies.
Ritcha Ranjan is an experienced industry leader across technology and product with more than 20 years of experience working within some of the most recognizable technology brands. She is currently the Vice President of Product Management at Microsoft, where she leads product and analytics and is building the company’s productivity experience. Before Microsoft, Ranjan held various leadership roles at Google, most recently leading product management and analytics for Google’s billion-plus-dollar SMB Ads and Google Finance divisions. While at Google, Ranjan also worked across Google’s professional workspace (formerly G Suite), growing usage across Docs, Sheets, Slides, Keep, and Sites, while also working to bring AI technology to its products. She also worked on Google Payments, and received a Google Founder’s Award for her work at the company.
Ranjan co-founded Five Pumpkins, an educational non-profit organization, and holds several patents for her work throughout her career. She received her M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Applied Sciences in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo.
Marc DeBevoise is an accomplished leader with wide-ranging experience in the direct-to-consumer, media, and technology industries. Marc recently led the global streaming, digital, and technology strategies and operations of ViacomCBS (now Paramount Global) as its Chief Digital Officer and CEO & President of CBS Interactive. During Marc’s leadership tenure, the company became a major player in direct-to-consumer streaming and a leading global Internet company, primarily driven by the founding and evolution of its streaming services, including Paramount+. Earlier in his career, Marc held executive positions at Starz and NBCUniversal and started his career in media and technology as an investment banker at Hambrecht & Quist and JPMorgan.
Marc also currently serves as the Vice Chairman and President of Argus Capital Corp., a tech-enabled-media focused special purpose acquisition corporation, and as Board President of The Door, a non-profit organization supporting at-risk youth in NYC.
Marc received his M.B.A. with distinction in Entertainment, Media & Technology, and Finance from New York University’s Stern School of Business and his B.A. in Economics and Computer Science from Tufts University.
Dr. Tsedal Neeley has been a professor at the Harvard Business School since 2007 and has been the Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School since 2018. Dr. Neeley heads the required Leadership and Organizational Behavior course in the MBA program and co-chairs the executive offering, Leading Global Businesses.
Dr. Neeley has also chaired faculty recruitment. She serves on the Board of Directors of Harvard Business Publishing, the Partnership Inc., and is a member of Rakuten Inc.’s Advisory Board. Dr. Neeley is the author of several books, articles, and cases focused on the virtualization of work, globalization, and digital transformation. She received her B.A. in Communication from Boston College, an Ed.M. in Human Development Psychology from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Management Science and Engineering, specializing in Work, Technology, and Organizations.
Tom Wheeler has extensive experience in both the public and private telecommunications sector. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution and is a Shorenstein Fellow for Media and Democracy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Tom served as the Chairman of the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) from 2013 to 2017, and immediately prior to this appointment served on President Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board.
Prior to his government service, Tom was Managing Director at Core Capital Partners, a venture capital firm investing in early stage IP-based companies. Also in the private sector, he is CEO of the Shiloh Group, a strategy development and private investment company specializing in telecommunications services. As a testament to the breadth and scope of his contributions, Tom is the only person to be selected to both the Cable Television Hall of Fame and the Wireless Hall of Fame.
Tom received his BA from The Ohio State University, where he was a recipient of its Alumni Medal.