Evan Beard

Last updated
Evan Beard
Evan Beard.jpg
Born (1986-12-03) December 3, 1986 (age 36)
Annapolis, Maryland
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Duke University [1]

Evan Beard is an American entrepreneur, engineer, and co-founder with Ashton Kutcher of the media company A Plus (aplus.com). [2] [3] A Plus ranks among the largest websites in the US, with 30 to 50 million monthly unique visitors, and six months after launch was the fastest growing website in comScore's Mobile Metrix database. [4] [5] Beard has been recognized on the Forbes "30 under 30" list [6] which features the "brightest young entrepreneurs, breakout talents and change agents" and Business Insider's list of the "most inspiring and influential people in New York tech". [7] Prior to A Plus, Beard co-founded Etacts and ArmorHub, both acquired by publicly traded companies. [8] [9]

Contents

Early life

Beard attended Duke University, [10] where he studied computer science and graduated with distinction in economics in 2009. [11] While finishing school he wrote a widely distributed iOS app, “Girlfriend Keeper”, which attracted attention from international media, including Good Morning America, the LA Times, Cosmopolitan Magazine, and local news and radio stations. [12] [13] The app asked for details about one's significant other and sent automated emails and text messages expressing affection, such as "it's only 67 days until your birthday, I might get you something green like your eyes".

Career

Etacts

In 2009, shortly after graduating college, Beard co-founded Etacts and was admitted to the Y-Combinator seed accelerator. [14] Etacts was a relationship management app that provided a unified view of one's contacts and all emails, calls, and texts with them. [15] It allowed setting reminders on one’s contacts to remember to stay in touch with them. [16] [17] It also provided a contextual widget within Gmail that automatically showed biographical details next to emails, such as the education and work history of your correspondents. [18] The company raised $700,000 from prominent angel investors, including Ron Conway and Ashton Kutcher. [19] In 2010, Etacts was acquired by Salesforce.com, [20] [21] [22] where Beard subsequently worked in engineering as a Senior Member of Technical Staff.

ArmorHub

In 2011, Beard co-founded Gridtech Inc which created ArmorHub.com. [9] [23] ArmorHub is an app that allows businesses to quickly scan their websites for application-level security vulnerabilities such as SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting. ArmorHub was acquired by Spirent Communications, a publicly traded British company. [24]

A Plus

In 2013, Beard moved to Los Angeles to co-found A Plus with Ashton Kutcher and Kendall Dabaghi. [2] [3] [4] A Plus is a technology-focused media company that creates positive journalism for millennials and uses its own technology for content creation, optimization and distribution. After a soft launch in early 2014, A Plus grew to 50 million unique visitors per month and six months after launch was the fastest growing site in comScore’s Mobile Metrix database. [4] [5] The site raised $3.5m from investors in 2015 and expects $8 million in revenue in 2016. [6] A Plus started in Kutcher’s living room and moved to New York City in 2014. [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gmail</span> Email service provided by Google

Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide making it the largest email service in the world. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or through the official mobile application. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and IMAP protocols.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Salesforce</span> American software company

Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.

Google Workspace is a collection of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products developed and marketed by Google. It consists of Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, Meet and Chat for communication; Currents for employee engagement; Drive for storage; and the Google Docs Editors suite for content creation. An Admin Panel is provided for managing users and services. Depending on edition Google Workspace may also include the digital interactive whiteboard Jamboard and an option to purchase add-ons such as the telephony service Voice. The education edition adds a learning platform Google Classroom and today has the name Workspace for Education.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xobni</span> American software company

Xobni was a San Francisco-based company that made software applications and services including products for Microsoft Outlook and mobile devices. It was founded in March 2006 by Adam Smith and Matt Brezina from Adam's dorm room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of the Y Combinator summer founder's program. In late 2006, it relocated to San Francisco to be closer to Silicon Valley. It was acquired by Yahoo! in July 2013 for more than $60 million and shut down one year later.

Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a startup company, with initial funding from seed accelerator Y Combinator.

HubSpot is an American developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006.

Ark is a personal search engine that uses filters such as hometown, current city, high school, college, gender, relationship status, employee, and interests, to search for new people, old classmates, old friends or acquaintances, and new business contacts. Features include managing users' inboxes from their mobile devices, and syncing data from their Yahoo, Aol, Gmail or Google Apps email accounts, while also finding information about whom they are communicating with.

Yesware is a sales productivity platform designed as an ease-of-use assistant for businesses. The company was founded by Matthew Bellows, Rajat Bhargava, and Cashman Andrus. The company has over 800,000 users, including companies like Acquia, Groupon, Zendesk and Square.

Tempo was an artificial intelligence-enhanced calendar application for iOS. Developed by Tempo AI, a spinoff of SRI International, the application was reviewed by numerous blogs and media outlets, including Wired, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and others. Raj Singh, Thierry Donneau-Golencer and Corey Hulen are the Co-Founders of Tempo AI, Inc.

Base CRM is an enterprise software company based in Mountain View, California with R&D offices located in Kraków, Poland. It provides a web-based all-in-one sales platform that features tools for email, phone dialing, pipeline management, forecasting, reporting and more. Base's platform is available on iOS and Android, and was the first full native CRM Android app available. On September 10, 2018 Base was acquired by Zendesk and later rebranded as Zendesk Sell.

Slack is an instant messaging program designed by Slack Technologies and owned by Salesforce. Although Slack was developed for professional and organizational communications, it has also been adopted as a community platform. Users can communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media, and files in private chats or as part of communities called "workspaces." Slack also uses IRC-style features such as persistent chat rooms (channels) organized by topic, private groups, and direct messaging. In addition to these online communication features, Slack can integrate with other software. Slack runs on Web, Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, Windows Phone and iOS.

Cirrus Insight is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that integrates Salesforce with third-party services, including Gmail and Microsoft's Office 365. The application was the first on Salesforce's AppExchange application marketplace to integrate Gmail with Salesforce.com, and it was the top-ranked application on the site for five months in 2012.

Streak is an American software company which is the developer of an eponymous customer relationship management platform for Gmail. The company also developed Secure Mail for Gmail, an open-source Google Chrome extension that allowed users to encrypt their Gmail messages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Product Hunt</span>

Product Hunt is an American website to share and discover new products. It was founded by Ryan Hoover in November 2013.

Zerocater is a foodservice company headquartered in San Francisco, CA, specializing in providing companies with catered meals from local restaurants, caterers, and food trucks. The company expanded its offerings in 2017 to include a fully customizable solution for office snacking called Zerocater Snacks and Kitchens and, in 2018, to deliver alcohol with Zerocater Pours. The company launched Enterprise Catering for companies with 500 or more employees in 2019. Zerocater currently feeds thousands of employees of companies including Slack, PagerDuty, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Salesforce, JUUL, Datadog and Cisco Meraki. As of November 2017, Zerocater operates in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Los Angeles, Austin, Washington D.C. and Chicago.

Paribus is an American company and creator of the price tracking app of the same name, which syncs with a user's email account to scan for receipts and negotiates with online companies to refund the difference if there is a price drop shortly after a purchase.

Acompli is a discontinued mobile app that allowed for user interaction with email messages as well as management of multiple email accounts in one programme. In addition, the tool also organized one's calendar and shared files. This application provided for integration with cloud storage platforms such as Dropbox, OneDrive, and iCloud; it also carried support for Microsoft Exchange and Gmail. Acompli launched on 24 April 2014. The startup company, which had $7.3 million in funding, was led by CEO Javier Soltero, J.J. Zhuang (CTO) and Kevin Henrikson.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A Plus (website)</span> News and entertainment website

A Plus is a digital media company based in New York City. The company produces original written, social, and video content, with a focus on positive journalism. The company states that it "strive[s] to deliver positive journalism to readers, with the intention of making a meaningful difference in the world by highlighting our common humanity, promoting personal growth, and inspiring social change."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MailTime</span>

MailTime is a mobile messenger application for iOS and Android devices, developed by MailTime Technology Inc. in 2013. The application is known as "email messenger" which integrates the feature of email and text messages. MailTime operates as a freemium model.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LogDog</span>

LogDog is a mobile Intrusion Detection System (IDS) app. It monitors various online accounts and scans multiple indicators that are associated with unauthorized access by taking into account a user’s routine across various devices and services. The app is currently available for Android and iOS.

References

  1. ↑ Scott Kraft (2010-04-29). "He's start-ups' best friend". LA Times.
  2. 1 2 Saba Hamedy (2015-01-23). "Ashton Kutcher launches new online platform called A+". LA Times.
  3. 1 2 Hope King (2015-02-25). "Ashton Kutcher wants to pay you to write for him". CNN.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Alyson Shontell (2015-03-19). "Last year, a blog called A Plus was created in Ashton Kutcher's living room. Now it has 50 million readers and it just raised $3.5 million". BusinessInsider.
  5. 1 2 Ventures, Palisades Media. "Palisades Media Ventures Partners With A Plus to Launch New Digital Video Offering". www.prnewswire.com (Press release). Retrieved 2016-02-03.
  6. 1 2 "30 Under 30 2016: Media". Forbes. Retrieved 2016-01-06.
  7. ↑ "SILICON ALLEY 100: Meet the most inspiring and influential people in New York tech right now". Business Insider. Retrieved 2015-10-19.
  8. ↑ Liz Gannes (2010-12-21). "Salesforce Buys Small Contact Management Start-Up Etacts". AllThingsD.
  9. 1 2 "ArmorHub's Web Security Service Scans For Vulnerabilities & Malware, Works Great For Startups As Well As Your Dad". TechCrunch. 2012-11-15.
  10. ↑ Kraft, Scott (2010-04-29). "He's start-ups' best friend". Los Angeles Times. ISSN   0458-3035 . Retrieved 2016-02-03.
  11. ↑ "Evan Beard | LinkedIn". www.linkedin.com. Retrieved 2016-02-03.
  12. ↑ Michelle Maltais (2009-09-23). "The Business and Culture of Our Digital Lives". Los Angeles Times.
  13. ↑ "Girlfriend App". girlfriendapp.com.
  14. ↑ Jason Kincaid (2010-02-22). "YC-Funded Etacts Makes Sure You Never Fall Out Of Touch With Your Contacts". TechCrunch.
  15. ↑ Tomio Geron (2010-05-14). "Newly Seeded Etacts Seeking Holy Grail Of The Unified Inbox". Wall Street Journal.
  16. ↑ "Startups And Top Investors Unite At Y Combinator's Tenth Demo Day". TechCrunch. 2010-03-23.
  17. ↑ Jason Kincaid (2010-03-06). "Etacts Launches First Implementation of oAuth For Gmail IMAP Accounts". TechCrunch.
  18. ↑ Whitson Gordon (2010-03-16). "Etacts Adds Contact Info, Social Networking, and Handy Statistics to Your Gmail Sidebar". LifeHacker.
  19. ↑ Marshall Kirkpatrick (2010-12-21). "The Acquisition of Etacts and Email as a Platform". ReadWriteWeb.
  20. ↑ Jolie O’Dell (2010-12-21). "Salesforce Acquires E-mail Contact Management Startup Etacts". Mashable.
  21. ↑ Matthew Lynley (2010-12-21). "Salesforce nabs another Y Combinator startup in email contact manager Etacts". VentureBeat.
  22. ↑ Leena Rao (2010-12-21). "Salesforce Buys Email Contact Manager Etacts". TechCrunch.
  23. ↑ Meg Rayford (2012-11-18). "Secure Your Website Easily, but Thoroughly with ArmorHub". Tech.co.
  24. ↑ "Spirent Brings New Vulnerability Scanning and Load Testing on a Cloud-Based Platform for Web and Applications Developers". Reuters. 2014-05-01. Archived from the original on 2014-07-24.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.