Leadership
Matthew Baird, VP, Engineering
Matthew Baird brings his considerable experience in developing enterprise-grade software and services as he oversees all engineering and infrastructure for Conductor. Most recently, Baird was the Vice President of Engineering and Operations for San Mateo based Yield Software. Prior to that he was VP of Technology at Chordiant Software where he led the development of predictive analytics products. Baird was also the founder and CTO of Motiva (acquired by Siebel Systems), and has held senior engineering and management positions at Oracle and PeopleSoft.
Baird is actively involved in Open Source technology development and industry specification and thought leadership. He is a committer and top-level project board member in the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), is a Sun JSR expert group member and also a W3C working group member.
Baird has a Bachelor of Science (Honors) in Computer and Information Science/Statistics from Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
Seth Besmertnik, CEO & Co-Founder
Seth Besmertnik guides corporate strategy and develops strategic partnerships for Conductor, and his vision and thought leadership have established the company as a recognized authority in natural search. Since co-founding the company in 2005, Besmertnik has navigated the company through multiple finance rounds and extraordinary growth. Today the company boasts a customer list of more than one hundred Fortune 500 and Internet Retailer 500 companies and hundreds of the world’s most recognized publishers. In addition, Conductor provides natural search solutions for more than half the top search engine marketing and optimization agencies in the United States.
Besmertnik frequently speaks at industry events as an expert in search marketing and is a frequent guest lecturer on entrepreneurship at various universities. In 2009, Besmertnik was selected as a Finalist for Ernst & Young’s prestigious Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
Besmertnik holds B.S. in Entrepreneurial Management from Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business.
Follow Seth on Twitter @Besmertnik
Dan Murphy, CFO
Dan Murphy brings over 20 years of executive financial experience to Conductor, and is responsible for overseeing all aspects of the finance, human resource and administration functions for the company. Prior to joining Conductor, Murphy was the SVP/CFO for Marketing Technology Solutions/Qualityhealth.com where he held concurrent responsibility for finance, technology, operations and consumer marketing functions while delivering consistent double digit revenue growth.
Prior to joining Marketing Technology Solutions in 2004, Murphy held several senior executive positions with Thomson Financial, including CFO of its Investment Management Group and, most recently, CFO of Sales, Marketing and Service - which controlled $1.6 billion in annual revenues. During Murphy’s decade-long tenure at Thomson, he was responsible for a number of functional areas, and his accomplishments included the integration of several key acquisitions.
With a B.B.A. in Accounting from St. Bonaventure University, Murphy began his career at Ernst & Young, where he served as a senior accountant.
Keith Nealon, SVP, Worldwide Sales
Keith Nealon joins Conductor with over 15 years of sales and executive experience and is responsible for our global sales and alliances operations. Most recently Nealon was SVP Worldwide sales at Eloqua, a marketing automation platform company, where in under 4 years he helped scale the company from a small startup to what became known as "the 800lb gorilla in the space", with global operations, an average compound growth of 80% year over year, and over 20,000 users in 30 countries.
Prior to Eloqua, Nealon held various sales leadership positions at Navisite,Inc. where he helped scale the company from $30 million to $125 million in revenues in just 3 years. Prior to Navisite, Nealon was CEO and co-founder of Nebula Technologies, an award winning international systems integration and consulting firm. The company enjoyed an average of 50% year over year growth and was ultimately sold in 2002
Nealon received a B.S. in Math & Computer Science from Trinity College in Dublin.
