Executive Team

Centro is led by a team of seasoned professionals, all with extensive experience in the online and offline publishing world.

Shawn Riegsecker Chairman & CEO
Virgil Bistriceanu CTO
Kelly Davis VP, Product Development
Leo Brubaker VP, Finance
Scott Golas VP, Human Resources

Shawn Riegsecker

Chairman & CEO

Shawn Riegsecker is the founder of Centro and currently leads its strategic vision as Chairman and CEO. Centro has developed a proprietary local media web-based platform that helps make advertising on local websites easy and efficient for hundreds of advertisers and agencies. Having worked his entire career in the confluence of publishing, advertising and technology, Riegsecker saw the need to help make the buying of local online media across thousands of traditional publisher websites easy for advertisers and their respective advertising agencies. He began his career in 1992 selling print advertising for the Akron Beacon Journal, moved on to leading the sales team at Cleveland.com and eventually to a similar role at Real Media. Mr. Riegsecker founded Centro to help create a frictionless media process between buyers and sellers in the local industry. Based in Chicago, the company has more than 100 employees and offices in ten cities. Mr. Riegsecker graduated from Bowling Green State University with a B.S. in Business Administration.

The Newspaper Association of America awarded Mr. Riegsecker the Advertising Person of the Year, which is given annually “to an advertising person who has fostered the ideals of partnership and cooperation in working with the newspaper industry.”

As a pioneer and innovator, Shawn was nominated as a finalist for Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award, which recognizes men and women who excel at growing and sustaining market-leading businesses.

Virgil Bistriceanu

CTO

Virgil Bistriceanu joined Centro as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in April of 2006 after 6 years as CTO of MyPoints.com, followed by more than 4 years in senior technology leadership positions at United Airlines and its subsidiaries. He was a co-founder and CTO of of MotivationNet, which later merged with Intellipost to form MyPoints.com, a company that went public successfully in 1999. While at MyPoints.com, he constructed, managed, and motivated a team of smart, independent, innovative and eager-to-learn loyal professionals who have a true sense of ownership of the products they create and support. As testament to this, many of them have joined his team at Centro.

Mr. Bistriceanu's team at MyPoints.com consisted of up to 75 professionals within the Development, Quality Assurance, Databases, and IT Operations departments. He managed a yearly technology budget of up to $25 million. Virgil's team successfully deployed three major releases of the MyPoints.com application and web site, together with three international implementations (Sweden, UK, and Japan).

At United Airlines Virgil managed, among other things, software development for united.com and software development and QA for United's next generation Internet Booking Engine; he worked closely with various business units to define, implement, and successfully run a release-based software delivery process that optimally used shared available resources, ensured predictability in application delivery and addressed business needs based on clear financial and strategic objectives. Virgil set standards and implemented processes to improve the overall quality of applications delivered such as automated unit-testing, test-driven development, mandatory functional, load and stress testing, etc.

Virgil is a true believer in agile software development and a big supporter of free and open-source software (F/OSS). His software development team at Centro practices Extreme Programming (two-week iterations, test-driven and pair programming, etc.) The team develops using Linux, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Mongrel, and Apache and focuses heavily on interaction design and usability, building interfaces using web standards (XHTML, CSS, and Javascript) and rich interactions with Ajax.

Virgil joined Centro for two main reasons (i) the company’s Manifesto which outlines a different way of defining corporate success in America — with emphasis on employees instead of money — and (ii) the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of revolution, a fundamental change in the way advertisers, big and small, interact with local media and the tidal shift of advertising dollars from national to local.

Since 1993, Mr. Bistriceanu has been an Instructor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he has been teaching undergraduate and graduate classes for the Computer Science and the Electrical Engineering Departments, ranging from 500 level Computer Architecture courses for graduate students, to 400 and 300 level Computer Architecture, Operating Systems, Information Security, Object-Oriented Design and Programming, Logic Design and Implementation and Discrete Mathematics courses for undergraduate students.

Mr. Bistriceanu holds his MS in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania. He has conducted research in performance analysis for parallel programming languages, with emphasis on Message Driven Computation as part of his Ph.D. study in Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The Illinois I.T. Association awarded Mr. Bistriceanu the Spotlight Award, which is given to the CIO/CTO for leadership and outstanding contributions in the application of information technology.

Kelly Davis

VP, Product Development

Armed with extensive experience in operations, account management and interactive marketing, Kelly Davis joined Centro in 2003 as the first employee. Since joining Centro, she has been instrumental in the growth and success of the company. As Vice President of Product Development, Ms. Davis oversees the Product Management department. Kelly leads the effort to ensure successful definition and execution of product requirements in addition to making sure end-users are properly trained and supported.

Prior to Centro, Ms. Davis gained a diverse media background at interactive media companies including Real Media, one of the original Internet media and technology firms, Max Online, an online advertising network, and Yesmail, a leading direct marketing solutions provider. During her tenure, Davis implemented successful online media programs for many Fortune 100 companies, including General Motors, Ford, Kellogg, Kraft, Nintendo, American Express, Office Depot, U.S. Army, among others. Ms. Davis graduated cum laude from Indiana University with a B.S. in Marketing.

Leo Brubaker

VP, Finance

Leo Brubaker joined the Centro team as the Vice President of Finance in August of 2006. With his financial and accounting expertise, Mr. Brubaker oversees Centro’s accounting department while also managing the company’s financial analysis, reporting, taxes, budgeting and forecasting.

Mr. Brubaker brings Centro more than four years of public accounting experience with Ernst & Young where he worked in the Advisory & Assurance Business Services group. Some of his audit clients with Ernst & Young included a few of the largest public and non-public companies in the world such as ABN AMRO, BP Amoco, Aon Corporation, and Fimat USA (subsidiary of Société Générale Group). After Ernst & Young, Mr. Brubaker moved to Oak Brook Bank, a public company, where he served as the Vice President and Controller. He was also heavily involved in Sarbanes Oxley processes for the bank, tax preparation, and development of a new Broker Dealer subsidiary.

Mr. Brubaker, a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), has a BS in Finance and Economics from Miami University (OH) and a Masters of Science in Accountancy from the University of Notre Dame.

Scott Golas

VP, Human Resources

Scott Golas leads Centro’s Human Resources, a pivotal role as the company continues to accelerate its growth. Scott joined Centro after having run the Human Capital Design practice at Booz-Allen Hamilton, focusing on Organization and Strategy with technology clients. While at Booz-Allen, Scott worked closely with clients who wanted to transform their organizations and their industries by applying strategic technology and operations changes. Scott organized and led executive and senior teams through organizational change recommendations and discussions to influence HR transformation-based strategies and projects.

Prior to joining Booz Allen, Scott was a Managing Consultant for PA Consulting. In this role, he worked to develop and implement workforce solutions that support and accelerate companies’ business strategies, and align the resources required to drive implementation. Before joining PA Consulting, he was V.P. & Global HR Outsourcing Director with NelsonHall, a business process research firm. he provided consulting in human resources services to both the service provider and buy-side communities.

Prior to joining NelsonHall, Scott was the Chief Strategy Officer and Portfolio Executive with Aon Consulting, Human Resources Outsourcing, based in Chicago. In this role, he developed operations, sales and marketing strategies; and developed teams comprising Aon’s practice areas and select technology and solutions providers. He had built a similar, strategic team during his four years at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he was the HRM (Human Resources Management) consulting practice leader for PWC’s West Region.

Scott was selected as one of the HRO Today Magazine “Superstars of HR Outsourcing” in 2004, and ”Human Resource Executive Magazine “Rising Stars of HR,” in 1995, and was a PricewaterhouseCoopers HR Innovation Award finalist in 2000. His BS is in Manufacturing Engineering & Technology from Purdue University, and his MS is in Organization Development from the Loyola University, Chicago.