Click a name to meet the team.

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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Judd Vinet

VP Technology

Judd Vinet is an acclaimed software engineer who has been writing code for 20 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 TCP 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!

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.

Linked In Github stephensugden.com

Jordan Tarasoff

Product Analyst

Jordan Tarasoff brings a passion for communication and a strong knowledge of sports to the team at Bet Smart Media. Jordan has been involved in numerous athletic organizations over the years as both a player and founder.

At Bet Smart Media, Jordan manages a series of activities internally across Bet Smart Media's products and labs projects, and externally through client services work. Jordan drives the creation of new features and refinements on current products and projects and manages the development of new ones. Researching and defining requirements, proposing innovative concepts, and working with the development team to complete projects are part of Jordan's key day-to-day activities.

Jordan is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree at the University of Victoria, and will receive his Bachelor of Commerce in 2013.

Linked In jordantarasoff.com

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