Advisory Board

Rob Adler

Rob is a seasoned, hands-on entrepreneurial leader with a track record of success. Rob most recently held the position of President and CEO of WordStream.  Prior to that, in 2006, he co-founded 80108 Media (now go2 Media) where he served as the company's CEO until August 2008. go2 is a leading mobile media company that provides users valuable information fine-tuned for their mobile device.  Previously, Rob co-founded CCBN and served as its President from the company's inception in 1997 until its sale to Thomson Financial in March 2004.  CCBN was a pioneer in enabling direct communications between public companies and the investment community over the Internet. Rob's first entrepreneurial venture, DigiTrace Care Services, Inc., (today known as SleepMed) is the leading provider of outpatient EEG and sleep disorder monitoring services in the country.

Rob graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brown University and a Master of Business Administration degree from Harvard University, where he earned the distinction of being a Baker Scholar. Rob is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson College. He also serves on the Jimmy Fund Visiting Committee at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

Rob is a bona fide leader within the start-up world. He has been a long-time friend of CustomMade, and it was only appropriate that his invaluable advice was recognized in a more formal capacity. We are grateful to have Rob join the team.

Rishi Dean

Rishi Dean is a seasoned entrepreneur with experience in getting companies off the ground. Rishi has been on the founding team of three firms: the e-commerce personalization platform, WiseUncle; the product design firm, Lime Design; and the digital video measurement company, Visible Measures, where he currently serves as the VP Product Development. Previously, Rishi has worked as a Program Manager at Microsoft, and has been a consultant to companies trying to design and implement innovation strategies.

Rishi also helps to mentor emerging companies as an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, and as a mentor with both The Founder Institute and MassChallenge. He received his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a Systems Design Engineering Degree from the University of Waterloo.

CustomMade seeks to bridge traditional, tangible services with efficient virtual communication strategies. Rishi is an experienced entrepreneur with a focus on building great products in both the physical and digital worlds, and as such offers key insights as CustomMade continues to grow.

Russell Herndon

Russ has spent his 25 year career as a successful executive in the healthcare and biotechnology industries, with a proven track record in building successful business infrastructures, pioneering innovative corporate and regulatory processes and advancing products through development. His industry experience includes senior management positions at Genzyme Corporation and Antigenics Inc., where he led some of the companies' most strategic and important initiatives. At Antigenics, Russ served as Chief Operating Officer and President from November 2000 through December 2005. He was with Genzyme Corporation from 1989 through 2000 holding various management positions, including President of Genzyme Tissue Repair, Senior Vice President of Genzyme Tissue Repair and Vice President of regulatory affairs for Genzyme Corporation.

Russ was the first non-founding cash investor in CustomMade, and is a close personal friend and mentor to both Seth and Mike.  He is adept at managing for value creation in the fiercely competitive and capital-intensive biotechnology industry.  Russ has been the first phone call when challenging situations arise.

Michael Meyer

Michael is an experienced leader of businesses in the consumer product and technology sectors. He has spent his 25 year career building and growing venture and private-equity backed companies and generating proven results.

Michael was most recently the Chief Administrative Officer of Restoration Hardware, one of the nation's leading purveyors of premium home furnishings.  Previously, from 2004-2008 he was the President of Wellness Pet Foods, a premium natural pet food brand.  From 2001-2004, he was the CFO of Marketmax, Inc., a technology firm that provides financial and inventory planning software to retailers in the US and Europe. And from 1995-2001, he was the Co-Founder and CFO of Snickelways Interactive, a technology firm that provided electronic commerce applications to the manufacturing, retail and financial services sectors.  Michael began his career in the banking industry where he spent 10 years as a middle-market lender and Vice President at National Westminster Bank (now Bank of America) and Manufacturers Hanover (now JP Morgan Chase).

Mr. Meyer received a BS in Chemical Engineering from NYU Polytechnic University and an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business.

From his tenure at Restoration Hardware, Michael knows consumer marketing in the world of premium home furnishings like the back of his hand. He thus understands the ecosystem surrounding CustomMade and offers invaluable guidance as we make our custom mark on the home goods industry and beyond.

Matthew Goldstein

Matthew Goldstein is currently a Senior Associate at Korn/Ferry International where he is a specialist in recruitment and talent management. Matthew conducts high-level searches within the Technology and Financial Services sectors that are both domestic and global in scope.

Matthew has over nine years of business development, sales and executive search experience in the start-up technology industry. Previous to his role as an Advisor to CustomMade, Matthew was our Vice President, Corporate Development, leading business development and recruitment efforts during 2010. Prior to joining CustomMade, he was Executive Search consultant at the global recruiting firm, J. Robert Scott, where he successfully conducted multiple senior-level searches for a range of venture-backed portfolio companies. Previously, as the former Director of Business Development for w3, Matthew was instrumental in the creation and monetization of Vivastreet, the third largest free classified website in the world.

Matthew completed his undergraduate studies in Economics at Wesleyan University (CT). He also holds an MBA from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, where he graduated with High Honors.

Having served on the senior team during the early stages of CustomMade, Matthew understands the company’s culture and need for talent management as the organization grows exponentially. If CustomMade is the “online guy who knows a guy (thanks UrbanDaddy!),” Matthew is the offline guy who knows a guy. A consummate networker, Matthew helps the organization knock on the right doors..

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Scott Ekman

Scott Ekman is Vice President of Marketing for Rockler Woodworking and Hardware, a national multi-channel retailer of woodworking tools and supplies. He has over 15 years of experience as a marketer in the consumer and business-to-business woodworking industries. At Rockler, he was instrumental in building their web channel business into one of the top 300 e-commerce sites in the country, including being selected as a "Top 50" retail website by Internet Retailer magazine in 2005.

Sam Clemens

Sam is a product guy with a sense for design and user experience. He is currently founder and VP Product & Marketing at InsightSquared, an early-stage startup with a business intelligence platform for small and medium businesses.

Before InsightSquared, Sam was VP Product at HubSpot, VP Product at BzzAgent, and led the planning & development of the Elance services marketplace.

His background also includes venture capital with Greylock Partners, Amazon.com’s Algorithms group, and Booz Allen Hamilton.

Sam has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.S. from Yale in Applied Math and Economics.

When he's not obsessing about product design, you can find Sam diving shipwrecks on his rebreather.

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Richard Oedel

Richard has been making things since his graduation from college in 1976. As CEO of Spir-it Inc, the largest US manufacturer of customized food service accessories (think arches and stirring cups of coffee. Billions and billions of them...) to individual maker of furniture and Managing Partner of Fort Point Cabinetmakers, he has been involved in both the craft and business sides of business for many years. As Managing Partner of Brookwood Partners, dedicated for 15 years to small startups and entrepreneurial ventures and Board member of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) he also has an intimate understanding of the startup environment so critical to successful entrepreneurship. He is also a long-time customer of Custommade.com.

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Andrew Teman

Andrew has been involved with the consumer web space since 1999, when he took a role with a short-lived eCommerce start-up that sold landscape equipment over the internet. In more recent times, he helped grow Pangea Media from inception, to over $10mm in yearly revenue, and also ran the digital brand for The Boston Beer Company (Samuel Adams). As an early adopter of digital and social tools, Andrew wears his low user id's on Foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook, as badges of honor.

Andrew is currently VP, Digital Strategy for Hill Holliday (NYSE: IPG), and has previously held roles with Focalex Inc, Intermix Media (parent company of MySpace), Fox Interactive (News Corp), and Prospectiv.

When not tinkering around with his iPad, laptop, or smartphone, he can be found playing soccer, riding his bike along the Charles River, or checking out Boston's newest restaurants.

Greg Rublev

Greg is a dedicated web products geek and the founder and CEO of LeanWagon, a startup helping dieters eat healthy and lose weight. Greg is also on the board of his previous venture, AsisChem, a boutique drug discovery services company.

Prior to LeanWagon, Greg spent 12 years designing, building and launching web products and SEO campaigns. He was responsible for web and API product lines at NetProspex, a B2B data company. Prior to NetProspex, he designed and launched massive SEO directories of people and company information at OneSource. Prior to OneSource, he managed the development of social sharing products at GreatNonprofits and Plum.com. Prior to Plum, Greg created and managed the web engineering team at ZoomInfo, which developed its flagship SaaS recruiting product and a number of consumer directory products. Greg started his career as the technical co-founder of CompleteCase, a first ever automated web-based paralegal service.

Greg earned a Bachelor’s degree in computer science from SUNY Buffalo and an MBA from Northeastern’s High Tech program.