Team

John Pollard

Founder and CEO

Over nearly two decades in technology, John has worked in some of the most innovative product categories. Prior to Jott, he was a Senior Director in the Mobile Devices group at Microsoft, leading the division's Strategy and Services efforts. John was an early employee at Expedia with which he spun out of Microsoft and went public. He led the international rollout of Expedia subsidiaries in Germany and the UK, and started the Expedia Corporate Travel product unit. John was also an early employee on Sidewalk.com, a groundbreaking local search and advertising web service. In the eighties, he worked in Cambridge Technology Partners' rapid development systems integration teams, and in International Public Health at Harvard. His teams have won significant industry awards, including Outstanding Achievement in Digital Marketing, Best European eCommerce Site, and Best of CES.

He holds an MBA from the University of Michigan, and a BA from Kenyon College.

Shreedhar Madhavapeddi

Founder and Vice-President of Products

Shree started his career at Microsoft in 1994 as a Software Engineer in the Windows Operating Systems team, but soon sought out start-up groups inside Microsoft, and made significant contributions to Mobile Information Server (now in Exchange), Smartphone and MSN Messenger. Most recently, he led the successful effort to connect MSN's IM network to Yahoo! Messenger, Vodafone Live!, Enterprise IM networks and Mobile text messaging networks worldwide. For the Windows Mobile group, Shree created Mobile2Market, a key platform bringing thousands of partner applications and services to market. Shree has two patents and six patents pending (all in the field of computer systems & network applications), and co-invented Deficit Round Robin (DRR), a scheduling algorithm for data networks currently used by Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks and others.

He holds an M.S. from Washington University, and a B. Tech from BITS, Pilani, India, both in Computer Science.

Doug Aley

Vice-President of Business Development

Doug began his career as an entrepreneur, co-founding SSB BART Group, a technology consulting and software firm focused on helping organizations make applications and web sites accessible to people with disabilities. Doug led the sales and business development teams, responsible for all revenue generation and for developing relationships with major systems integrators and complementary technology firms. Doug continues to serve on the board of SSB BART Group today. Following SSB BART Group, Doug went on to a variety of roles at Amazon.com including product management for the launch of Amazon Unbox (Amazon.com's video download service) and most recently general management of the third-party seller business for the company's sporting goods category.

He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Stanford University.

Dave Rich

Vice-President of Business Operations

Dave comes to Jott with best of breed experience in speech recognition, call center operations and enterprise sales. He began his career with American Airlines and SABRE in 1990, where he managed a wide variety of teams in corporate development, marketing and operations. Before leaving, Dave oversaw all of the planning and technology operations for American's call center organization and many of the contact center functions in the southwest reservations office. Dave then joined speech recognition technology leader Nuance Communications, where he was part of a core team that was instrumental in upgrading the sales, operations, and marketing functions to scale the business through an IPO. After moving back to his home town of Seattle in 2002, Dave incubated three technology start-ups in the medical smartcard, mobile security, and internet spaces. Dave likes to share his passion for customer service process improvement, and has been a frequent conference speaker on measurements and rewards in customer contact centers, speech biometrics, and the application of speech technology to solve practical customer service problems.

Dave has an MBA from the University of Michigan, a BA from Pacific Lutheran University, and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Freiburg in Germany.