Brian Hurley,  President and CEO

Brian Hurley is the President and CEO of Purple Forge.  He is an entrepreneurial leader with over 24 years of experience in building strong teams, innovative products and international businesses.  Brian co-founded Purple Forge with John Craig.  He previously founded Liquid Computing in 2003 and as it's CEO raised over $44 million in venture financing, built a world-class team, delivered an award winning product to market and won international sales.  He has built and led numerous successful business teams in Nortel, Bell-Northern Research and Microtel Pacific Research.  Brian is the author of the best selling book "A Small Business Guide to Doing Big Business on the Internet".  He was the 2007 winner of the OCRI "Next Generation Executive" award.  He is an active member of the local tech community and a past member of the OCRI Board of Directors.  He is an alumnus of the Young Presidents Organization.  Brian is a member of the GTEC SCOAP Honouree Selection Committee.  He is an advisor to What Wins and other early stage companies.  He is a founding member of the organizing committee for the 2009 re-launch of Lead to Win and is an active mentor to  participant companies.  Brian is a past member of The Ottawa Network Board of Directors.  Brian is a member of the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors.  Brian graduated from Carleton University with a Bachelor of Engineering.

More info available on LinkedIn

John Craig, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing

John Craig is the Vice-President of Sales and Marketing of Purple Forge.  Mr. Craig is a recognized market expert in the application of mobile technologies for collaboration and communication.  He was most recently the Director of Enterprise Mobile Communications at CounterPath Corporation, where he was responsible for key customer relationships, business case and product requirements for CounterPath's enterprise mobility product line.  Mr. Craig has over 13 years of experience in the telecommunications industry, and has held increasingly senior technical and customer facing roles with CrossKeys Systems Corporation (now Oracle), Nortel and FirstHand Technologies, acquired by CounterPath in 2008.  Mr. Craig holds a Bachelor of Applied Science (Honors) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, and is both an Ontario Professional Engineer and a Member of the IET.  

Andrew Treble [B.Sc., M.Sc. Finance], Advisor

Andrew Treble graduated with a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Queen's University in 1986. After Queen's, Andrew joined an R&D group of Pratt & Whitney Canada and developed a fly-by-wire full authority gas turbine engine controller for helicopter applications. In 1997, Andrew received his M.Sc. in Finance from the London School of Economics. After working as a CFO for a small Canadian manufacturer, Andrew joined Export Development Canada (EDC) and spent six years in their project finance group working on overseas project and onshore equity financings. After leaving EDC, Andrew joined the global investment banking arm of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) in the Middle East where he worked a Director of Investment Banking an on large power, infrastructure and petrochemical transactions with significant international clients. The transactions included national privatisation programs of infrastructure assets to more traditional project financing advisory roles. Andrew is currently a partner of Apex Group Ltd. which provides specialised finance and tax services.

Andrew Moffat, Advisor

Andrew Moffat is the Co-Founder and CEO of Keshet Technologies Inc., a company that assists up-and-coming IT businesses and entrepreneurs with financing and strategic guidance.

More info available on LinkedIn

Mike Sandler, Advisor

Mike Sandler is a seasoned technology entrepreneur in the web and collaboration technology space. He has more than 17 years of management and software development experience in both private and public high technology organizations.

In 2003 Mike Sandler founded Epiphan Systems where he holds the position of President & CEO. Epiphan Systems is a world leader in development and production of high resolution VGA and DVI video capture hardware. The company's solutions built on a foundation of best practices are used extensively in a wide variety of areas including video recording, medical imaging and conference recording. Epiphan Systems has more than 7,000 customers all over the world and interacts with a large dealer network. With over 40,000 units delivered to civil and military customers in more than 90 countries, Epiphan Systems relentlessly embraces the competitive challenges for maintaining its leadership position on the market.

In addition to his role as CEO & Founder of Epiphan Systems, Mike is also President & CEO of Mediphan Inc., a company that specializes in the capture, broadcast, and recording of VGA or DVI images from medical equipment. Previously, Mike was vice president of research and development at PointShot Wireless, where he worked on North America?s first operational mobile wireless platform for trains. In 1999, Mike founded IPMeeting Inc., a software manufacturer that produced best-of-breed virtual meeting and synchronous collaboration applications. IPMeeting was acquired by DWL Incorporated in 2000, which was acquired by IBM in 2005.

Mike began his career working in driver development, Internet, network-based applications, telecommunications and information security during his terms in the Russian Academy of Science, Nortel Networks, Milkyway Technologies, Entrust, Gandalf Technologies, Sterling Software and Alcatel. He later began his own software development business, Epiphan Consulting, which became a leading provider of innovative WindowsCE remote diagnostics tools.

Mike received his M.Sc. in Computer Science from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and has been guest lecturer in Carleton University.