Executive Team

Vinny Lingham

Founder, Chief Executive Officer

Vinny is a seasoned, globally acclaimed entrepreneur who has founded a number of businesses, including the award-winning search engine marketing company, Clicks2Customers. He was recently chosen as a Young Global Leader Honoree 2009 by the World Economic Forum. He has been recognized as a high-impact entrepreneur by Endeavor Global and awarded the 2006 Top Young IT Entrepreneur. He serves on numerous international advisory boards for search engine and affiliate marketing, including Commission Junction and Yahoo!, speaks at conferences around the world and is frequently cited on Web 2.0 trends. He studied Information Systems at the University of Cape Town and graduated with an honors degree in Electronic Commerce from the University of South Africa.

Brent Viljoen

Founder, Chief Technology Officer

Brent brings more than a decade of software engineering management experience to Yola. As Chief Technology Officer, he designed and coordinated the implementation of the Yola application architecture and now oversees all technical design and development. Before he co-founded Yola, he was a Technical Product Manager at Clicks2Customers, an award-winning Search Engine Marketing company, where he met Vinny Lingham. Brent also managed the development of Portico, a rapid rich-internet-application development platform that was successfully deployed in the health care, finance and retail sectors across four continents.

Trevor Harries-Jones

Chief Operating Officer

Trevor brings a world of financial and management experience from two continents. Before Yola, he was Senior Vice President of Finance at OpenTV (OPTV), where he was an integral member of the executive team and oversaw the controllership, treasury, facilities, tax and investor relation functions. Before that, Trevor spent more than six years with PricewaterhouseCoopers in San Jose and Cape Town. There, he specialized in internet and software practice and provided management consulting and audit services to a range of clients, including Excite@Home, AOL and M-Web. Trevor graduated with a Bachelors degree in Commerce from the University of Cape Town, and is both a CPA and a Chartered Accountant (SA).

Randy Almond

Vice President, Marketing

Randy brings more than 10 years of experience in marketing and business consulting to the Yola team. Prior to joining Yola, Randy led the online marketing team at Walmart.com and drove customer acquisition through a variety of online marketing channels and partnerships. As a consultant at Accenture and The Boston Consulting Group, Randy worked with Global 500 companies in financial services, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals. Randy graduated with honors in History from Princeton University, and earned a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Southern California.

David Saxton

Vice President, Business Development

David led business development for 7 years at Snapfish (now a division of Hewlett-Packard). As a key member of the management team, he created strategic partnerships with ISPs, retailers, and other Fortune 500 companies that drove millions of new customers and profitable growth. Before Snapfish, Dave was Director of Business Development at Ebates.com and held a senior sales role at Real Media, where his clients included Wal-Mart, Bank of America, and Microsoft. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and holds advisor positions with Autonomy Entertainment and Kidlandia.