Management

Khris Loux

CEO & Co-Founder

Khris Loux has a strong 15-year track record of achievement in the software industry, specializing in negotiations and business development. As CEO and Co-Founder of Echo, he leads the company's strategic positioning and operational initiatives to ensure a culture of rapid innovation and success. A successful entrepreneur, Khris is also co-author of the Synaptic Web and Backplane Protocol, a proposed open standard that enables disparate javascript applications on a page to communicate seamlessly with each other, in real-time. Prior to founding Echo, Khris founded security software firm, Securix, which was acquired by RSA Data Securities for $115M. A sought after speaker at industry events, Khris has spoken at dozens of marketing and technology conferences including The Next Web, OMMA Global 2012, Social TV Summit, SXSW and Web 2.0.

Khris has a Bachelor of Science degree with a double major in Economics and Finance, and a minor in Computer Science, from Mount Saint Mary's College in Maryland.

Lev Walkin

CTO & Co-Founder

With over 15 years of experience in software development and systems administration, Lev designs and develops high performance, special purpose network-oriented software for IP-based networks, specializing in in network security, cryptographic applications, protocols and secure programming practices. Lev founded the Practice of Functional Programming Journal (PFP), which is an online peer-reviewed magazine popularizing a functional programming approach in software development with a current audience of over 10,000 Russian-speaking software professionals. Prior to joining Echo, Lev was an ASA platform developer at Cisco, where he developed hardware abstraction and POSIX-like threading, file system implementations and general portability layer for a proprietary operating system. Lev has previously held software development and systems administrations positions for Netli, Ulyanovsk GSM and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

Chris Saad

Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder

Chris brings over 10 years of entrepreneurial excellence to Echo, having founded over 7 workgroups, non-profits and start-ups over the last 14 years. Most recently, Chris co-founded the Data Portability project, an initiative supported by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, MySpace and Plaxo that enables web users' identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data to be discovered and shared between chosen tools or vendors. Chris also co-founded the APML (Attention Profiling Markup Langauge) Workgroup, promoting an open format for describing a user's ranked interests for 'Attention Aware' applications. Chris has also co-founded the Media 2.0 Workgroup, Faraday Media, RedShift and Radioactive, where he set strategic direction and championed the advancement of the real-time social web.

Chris' role at Echo is to track trends in the marketplace, listen to and participate in the community and translate those needs into actionable product direction.

Philippe Cailloux

COO

Philippe brings over 15 years of product design and management leadership to Echo where he drives the company's operational focus. Philippe's previous tenures include Principal Designer and Manager of the Product Design Group at Adobe, Director Product Design at Roxio, VP Product Design and Product Management at FilmLoop, and consulting for several successful Internet startups.

Philippe has trained many User Experience professionals and served as Vice-Chair of Interaction Design for the Industrial Design Society of America. Philippe is also an avid photographer and serves as co-president of "the best little Camera Club in Palo Alto".

Jason Hoch

SVP of Customer Strategy and Product Marketing

Hoch is a 17-year digital veteran, the last 10 years acting in senior leadership positions across a wide array of media and entertainment brands. Hoch most recently served as Senior Vice President of Digital Operations for WWE, where he led the Company's award-winning digital strategy across web, mobile, social and video platforms.

Prior to WWE, Hoch was Vice President of Product and Mobile Development for Discovery Communications' collection of Digital properties. Hoch was part of the HowStuffWorks.com leadership team that was acquired for $250 million in a 2007 acquisition by Discovery Communications.

Hoch's work has been nominated for and won numerous awards in the Social TV space. Hoch is a frequent speaker at industry events and his work has been featured industry publications such as Mashable, The Next Web, Lost Remote and Tech Crunch.

Hoch holds bachelor degrees in political science and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ron Bouganim

VP of Corporate Development & Partnerships

Ron Bouganim is a serial entrepreneur in the telecommunications and consumer Internet sectors, having co-founded or been a member of the senior management of startups including CCI (sold to British Telecom), Trymedia (sold to Macrovision), and Razz.

Ron has a deep understanding of how to develop ideas that start on a blank page into organizations that have far reaching scale. Before their respective acquisitions, CCI had 750 employees and was profitably generating $40M in top line revenues with operations in 10 countries from Mexico to Argentina. Trymedia provided outsourced commerce to over 1000 video game portals in the US and Europe generating over 300 million downloads from a catalog of 750 video game SKUs. Ron has raised over $300 Million in venture capital and vendor financing and completed 7 M&A transactions.

Ron has a Double Major in Accounting and International Business from McGill University, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude. He is married and has two children who will always be the startups he is proudest of.

Vlad Skvortsov

VP of Engineering

Vlad has over 10 years of internet industry software development experience, working on the design and implementation of server-side applications on the UNIX platform. Vlad specializes is in information retrieval, statistics, high-performance and distributed systems.

Prior to joining Echo, Vlad was a member of Yahoo's highly acclaimed FlexForce (aka "Tiger") team providing professional software engineering services to groups all across the company. Previously, Vlad held senior engineering positions at Netli, which was acquired by Akamai, and Ulyanovsk State Technical University in their network operations center.