Fred is an entrepreneur, skier, and technologist who likes to introduce people to innovative technologies that enrich lives while having a positive impact on the community. He has always wanted to start his own venture, and was inspired by retailers and other independent businesses who decided to go off on their own to search for something new and better for themselves and their families. Fred came up with the idea for Knack when visiting his hometown in Massachusetts. The small businesses and artists that made the town so vibrant were struggling, and many had closed their doors. Fred created Knack to help these businesses access a market currently dominated by national retailers. Fred is not only the founder but is also a customer and is using Knack to build his perfect registry with his fiance Averell.

Fred previously held the position of Enterprise Account Executive at Yammer, a San Francisco based enterprise social networking start-up. Fred was a top performer at Yammer and had the opportunity to learn more about start-up leadership by working under David Sacks, previous COO of Paypal and current CEO of Yammer. Prior to joining Yammer, Fred was at salesforce.com for over 4 years and specialized in sales and marketing strategies for small businesses.

John is an innovative product leader with a love for bringing compelling and successful products to market. John joined Knack to bring his technical expertise, product strategy insight and software design acumen to bear on this exciting opportunity to support small business and change the gift registry landscape.

John previously held the position of Vice President Product Management at Blueprint Software Systems, a Toronto-based software company building requirements definition and management software. John led Product Management at Blueprint and was responsible for product strategy, product roadmap, product and user interface design, as well as customer validation and usability testing. Before Blueprint, John was a Program Manager responsible for a number of Microsoft products. Among other achievements at Microsoft, John led the team that created the User Experience vision for Office 365. John was also responsible for project management and running the software development process for a number of highly visible releases of the Live Meeting web conferencing service. John has a bachelor’s degree in CS from Pomona College, and a Masters in CS from Columbia University.