Marketplaces without 
the middlemen

Kanth Gopalpur has been involved in ecommerce since its inception in the 1990’s. After helping found the online arm of Powell’s Books, Powells.com in 1995, he joined venture backed Django’s Music as the VP of eCommerce. In 2002 he founded Monsoon Works and led the company through rapid, profitable growth with the company’s more than 1,000 customers processing $1 billion+ in online sales annually. Monsoon Works appeared on the Inc. 500 list for three straight years before it was sold to a private equity group in 2010 and merged with two other companies to form Monsoon Commerce. Monsoon Commerce provided over 3,000 merchants with software solutions that drove revenues in excess of $2 billion annually in multi-channel sales across online, offline and mobile points of sale. The company’s software solutions integrated with over 30 leading eCommerce platforms (Magento, Volusion, Amazon WS) and leading global marketplaces (Amazon, eBay, Rakuten).

Anthony Nystrom has over 20 years experience translating business needs and ideas into solutions for enterprise and startups as a developer, founder, architect, and CTO. Before joining Public Market, Anthony was Principal, Artificial Intelligence for Mashable, successfully leading their NLP initiatives in classifications, modeling, summarization, and predictive analytics. Aside from being an accomplished computer scientist, he has raised capital via venture, strategic and angel investors, with many exits and IP acquisitions ranging from informatics, codecs, and EMR's to streaming platform-specific applications as interactive platform-neutral video. He's led development for clients such as CATO Institute, Citi, and many more. He holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Minnesota and a BA in Anthropology and Biology from the University of Colorado. He's also an AI/ML mentor at NeuroLaunch, the world's first accelerator for neuroscience.

Xavier Helgesen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Off Grid Electric, a leading distributed solar energy company focused in Africa. Off Grid Electric has raised over $100 Million to make solar energy & storage affordable to the mass market via pre-paid, plug and play technology. The company's investors include Tesla, EDF, Total, DBL Partners and Helios Partners. He is also the co-founder of Better World Books, a leading social enterprise that has raised over $20 Million for global literacy and donated tens of millions of books. He served as CEO of Indaba Systems, a multi-channel software company built from technology developed at Better World Books. In 2009, he was recognized as the Best Social Entrepreneur by Businessweek and given the Fast Company Social Capitalist award. Xavier holds an MBA from Oxford Saïd Business School, which he attended on a Skoll Scholarship, and a BA from the University of Notre Dame.

Robin Jones is a startup jill-of-all-trades and Public Market is her 7th entrepreneurial venture. She has held leadership roles across a broad array of functions, including marketing, partner/developer ecosystems, IP licensing, sales operations, HR & finance, product & project management, M & A, and fundraising. Robin was most recently SVP Marketing & Biz Dev at Socrata, where she inherited an underperforming team, reworked the go-to-market strategy, and left her tenure in the role with the sales team enjoying 6X+ qualified pipeline coverage. She founded and grew the OEM business unit at Esri to $2.9M in revenue over 2.5 years. She joined Esri via the acquisition of Geoloqi, a mobile location services startup at which she served as COO. She also co-founded FonJax, where she was VP of Biz Dev, engineering the sale of the company to Keynote Systems. Robin has an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and a BS from Stanford. She serves on the board of directors of TiE Oregon.