Jesse Learmonth, President

When he was 17, Jesse started selling sports betting tickets at a small grocery store on behalf of the BC Lottery Corporation, learning from an early age how sports betting products were packaged up and delivered as an experience. Over the next 12 years, he spent thousands of hours watching the sports betting industry mature as a casual weekend warrior bettor, and in the process, saw huge potential to redefine the betting experience by embracing new technologies, platforms, and channels.

At Bet Smart Media, Jesse provides the overall product vision, and to borrow a football term, calls the plays that ensure the company’s constant forward progress. Bet Smart Media is the second company Jesse has co-founded. Its raison d’etre is to provide innovative product solutions to the sportsbook operators that serve bettors like himself, the products that he wished were available to him 12 years ago, but only technologically feasible here in 2012.

Jesse holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Victoria (2005), is a rabid MMA fan, and hopelessly romanticizes that the Toronto Blue Jays will again win the AL East… someday.

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Grant Storry, VP Business Development

Grant Storry heads up business development, strategy, and marketing for Bet Smart Media. With over 10 years of business experience, Grant has worked in leadership roles across startups, SMEs and Fortune 500 companies. He brings an entrepreneurial mindset to his management approach and enjoys building and leading high-performance teams.

Before embracing the startup lifestyle and co-founding Bet Smart Media, Grant found success climbing the corporate ladder. He has held a variety of senior leadership roles managing 45+ person operations teams, online demand generation teams, online marketing teams and sales teams. He’s no stranger to aggressive revenue targets, having managed and rapidly grown P&Ls from $5M to $15M and holding responsibility to drive online demand generation for a $100M/yr business.

Grant is fluent with all the latest trends and technology in marketing automation, CRM, demand generation, search engine marketing, social media, and online product development. Grant graduated from the University of Victoria with a degree in Commerce and Entrepreneurship (2003).

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Judd Vinet, VP Technology

Judd Vinet is an acclaimed software engineer who has been writing code for 18 years. During university (when he should have been in classes!), he was at home creating the Arch Linux distribution, now one of the 10 most popular Linux distributions… worldwide!

Judd is a frequent author on, contributor to, and advocate of open source software. At Bet Smart Media, Judd is responsible for all-things technology: deciding the languages used in our technology stack, system infrastructure and administration, and scalability and support.

Before co-founding Bet Smart Media, Judd consulted to a number of successful dot-com companies, including Wondermill Webworks, Foodzie, Magento, and Nabbr. To keep his tools sharp, he enjoys creating new websites and applications in his spare time, some of which include an expense-tracking platform, an RSS aggregator, an MVC web framework, and a port-knocking system. Judd holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Victoria (2004).

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Jonathan Cochran, Lead Designer

Jon Cochran is an interface designer and web developer that has spent the past four years running his own agency, Couch Interactive. In fact, Jon started working with Bet Smart Media on a contract through Couch Interactive before joining us full-time in 2010. His decision to join Bet Smart Media was an easy one after he saw how horrendous the majority of interfaces are in the iGaming industry, making it his mission to help add sex appeal to the sports betting experience!

Scratching his own entrepreneurial itch, Jon is also the co-founder Quote Robot, a proposal-writing and quoting system for independent designers and developers like himself. QuoteRobot has been featured and reviewed by sites including AppStorm, Speckyboy Design Magazine, and AppEveryday.

At Bet Smart Media, Jon is responsible for the look and feel of all our products, which reflect his design principles and attention to the end-user experience. Jon loves producing in HTML5 and JavaScript almost as much as he hates Internet Explorer!

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Bob Warwick, Software Engineer

Bob Warwick is a developer with an intense focus on interaction design. He got deeply into technology when he started writing for Applefritter, an Apple hardware modding website, and got his first taste for startups working for Spymac when they released the first 1GB webmail service.

Bob’s entrepreneurial drive has led to him developing, launching, and supporting his own Mac iOS apps, including Stone Hill Invoicer 2, Stone Hill Time Card, and Locations 3. In addition to supporting these products, when he’s not working for Bet Smart Media, Bob is quietly attaching the wheels to a startup of his own.

At Bet Smart Media, Bob plays lead roles in the development of products on the Facebook platform, and iOS applications on iPhone and iPad devices. Bob holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science awarded with Distinction from Bishop’s University (2011).

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Stephen Sugden, Data Engineer

Stephen Sugden has been programming for over a decade, contributing to and creating a number of open source projects. His love of teaching has led him to delivering tutorials on various programming tools and languages in professional and academic contexts. He also started the Software Development Organization at the University of Victoria to help his fellow students find projects and mentors.

His current passion is enabling the discovery of new perspectives on large, complex datasets. Stephen was most recently with Terapeak where he was a key member of their product and Data Insights teams, creating applications that helped over a half-million online Ebay merchants optimize their sales.

At Bet Smart Media, Stephen holds the keys to the complex technical backbone of our apps, applying his data-modelling, application scaling, and big-data processing talents to ensure that the end-user experience is consistently amazing.

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Jordan Tarasoff, Marketing Specialist

Jordan Tarasoff brings a passion for communication and a strong knowledge of sports fandom to the marketing team at Bet Smart Media. Jordan has been involved in numerous athletic organizations over the years, and even helped found the Pemberton Grizzlies baseball team in the Sea to Sky Baseball Association.

At Bet Smart Media, Jordan provides top-drawer support to customers of our products. He also manages user communities for our products, including Twitter and Facebook, and produces regular content on our Team Trends blog. Jordan is also the always-important “first user” of all new features and product releases before they are released to the general public.

Jordan is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree at the University of Victoria, and will receive his Bachelor of Commerce in 2012.

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Steven Dengler, Director

Steven Dengler is a Director of Bet Smart Media. He is also the CEO and co-founder of XE.com Inc. Since its inception in 1993, XE.com has grown to become the world’s favourite currency site, currently ranked by Amazon’s Alexa service as the 308th most popular site in the world. In addition, Steven is the founder of Dracogen Strategic Investments, which provides strategic financing to a number of promising high-tech and creative ventures. With nearly twenty years of at the helm of an industry-leading online business, Steven is a tremendous asset to the Bet Smart team.

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