Benjamin Chen
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Benjamin Chen is a 20-year veteran of high tech startups. Prior to Mochila, Mr. Chen was a founder of AppGenesys, a leading managed services web hosting provider for Fortune 500 clients, partnered with Intel, Softbank, JP Morgan, where he was Chairman, CEO and CTO.

Previously, Mr. Chen was the CIO and CTO at iXL, a strategic e-business consulting firm. At iXL, he helped grow the company from 100 to 3,000 employees worldwide and from $2M to $120M revenue per quarter. During Mr. Chen's tenure, iXL was known for delivering innovative technology solutions to the F500, included a $50M contract with Delta Airlines and $100M contract with General Electric. Other key customers included AT&T, CheapTickets.com, FEDEX, Sony (AiBO Launch), Tickets.com, and WebMD. Mr. Chen was part of the executive management team that helped take iXL public in 1999.

Prior to iXL, Mr. Chen worked at CBS Studio Center, as a technologist working on some of the first convergence of prime time television content and the internet. Mr. Chen also produced the 1996 Emmy Awards Cybercast, demonstrating the world’s largest number of internet video streams that year. Mr. Chen has also served on the advisory/boards of Teralytics and Exodus/Digital Island, a Cable and Wireless Company. He received a B.S. in international finance from the University of Southern California and is an avid martial artist with a Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do.

Carolyn Bekkedahl
President, Chief Revenue Officer
Carolyn Bekkedahl's experience in consumer magazine publishing and advertising sales spans 17 years. During her career, she has managed the sales and marketing operations for more than 15 magazines in a variety of categories. Most recently, Ms. Bekkedahl was President of the Entertainment and Active Lifestyle Magazine Groups at American Media Inc. with responsibility for ten magazines. Highlights of her tenure at AMI include the successful re-launch of Star Magazine which resulted in a 50% increase in advertising revenue. In addition, she drove unprecedented revenue and EBITDA growth at Shape Magazine, leading to its inclusion on Adweek's Hot List for three consecutive years.

Prior to that, she held successive management positions at Hachette Filipacchi Magazines. Ms. Bekkedahl has been active in major magazine and advertising trade organizations, including Advertising Women of New York, Magazine Publishers of America, Cosmetic Executive Women and the Consumer Health and Pharmaceuticals Association.

Ms. Bekkedahl holds a BA from The College of William & Mary, and lives in lower Manhattan with her husband, Michael and daughter, Julia

Mary Jo Romeo
VP Advertising Sales
Mary Jo Romeo's digital and integrated sales experience spans two decades. Prior to joining Mochila, she was Vice President of Sales and Client Services at BabyCenter. At BabyCenter, Romeo headed up sales and client services teams for the leading online baby and parenting website with over 4.3 million unique visitors and 120 million plus page views per month.

Prior to working with BabyCenter, Romeo was Vice President and Regional Manager for The Weather Channel and Vice President and Publisher of Working Mother Media. Romeo also worked at Gruner & Jahr for over four years, as Associate Publisher then Publisher of Parents magazine and the Parents Media Group.

A graduate of Penn State University and distinguished alum, Romeo has been involved with the board of the Penn State Professional Women’s Network of New York since 1997. She is very involved in the N.Y. ad community and currently serves as Co-chair of the Executive Committee of AWNY (Advertising Women of N.Y.). Mary Jo lives in Bronxville NY with her husband and has four step-children and a 20-year-old son.

Bill Lindsey
VP Engineering & Technical Operations
Bill Lindsey has over 20 years of software development experience, including over 10 years designing commercial print and web publishing systems for companies such as Reed Elsevier and ITT, where he developed software that produces legal reference books and yellow page directories.

From 1996 to 1998, Mr. Lindsey was a systems architect for TRW, where he developed an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solution for AT&T Broadband's customer care organization. Most recently, as chief architect at B-Bop Associates, he led the design of one of the first native XML databases, inventing patent-applied techniques for indexing XML content with relational database technology.

Mr. Lindsey was an invited expert in the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) "SGML on the Web" activity where he participated in the design of XML and served on the XSLT working group in designing XML's transformation language. He is the maintainer of the Java XSLT engine, the open source "XT," and is the lead developer of the open source XML processing engine, XMLECHO. He studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Roberta Heiman
VP Client Services
Roberta Heiman has been active in the digital media space for close to 15 years. She began her interactive career at BoxTop Entertainment which was acquired by iXL Enterprises in 1997. Working with and for several interactive agencies, she has extensive experience in the conception, brand strategy, user experience, editorial, marketing, design and development of interactive and online Digital Media products, services and experiences.

As Executive Producer, web and new product development at redherring.com, she managed the re-launch of the web site to accommodate a rapid growth during the height of the dot-com boom. While Director of New Media at The WB Television Network, Roberta spearheaded the redesign and development of TheWB.com. The WB was the first network to fully stream a TV pilot episode online (Yahoo) prior to its television premiere. Additionally, she developed online destinations for The WB PR and Television Affiliate Marketing constituencies resulting in substantial cost savings to Time Warner.

Ms. Heiman actively encouraged traditional TV advertisers to move online, and developed innovative, integrated marketing solutions that appealed to the core 18 - 35 demographic. Ms. Heiman attended UC Berkeley and Antioch University where she received her BA in Psychology. She is an active member of The Television Academy of Arts and Sciences, Interactive Peer Group and was a 2005 Emmy Finalist for Program Specific Enhanced or Interactive Television. She resides in Los Angeles.

Lisa Granatstein
Editorial Director
Lisa Granatstein has enjoyed a 20-year career as a journalist working in broadcast TV, print and digital media. Prior to joining Mochila, Ms. Granatstein spent 11 years at Mediaweek where she covered the magazine industry, and the last three as editor of Mediaweek.com and managing editor of the weekly print edition.

Ms. Granatstein has appeared as a media expert on numerous entertainment and news outlets, including the Today Show and Access Hollywood, as well as on cable networks CNN, CNBC and Fox News Channel. Additionally, she has been quoted in several newspapers including USA Today, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian.

Before Mediaweek, Ms. Granatstein was a reporter for Time magazine and an associate editor of its technology spinoff Time Digital. She began her journalism career in television news at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto. Ms. Granatstein holds two Masters degrees, one from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and another from the University of Toronto where she studied Political Science.