Brian Crook

Brian Crook is the founder and President of Cerebra, a venture backed company powering next-generation mobile merchandising and recommendation tools for media publishers and ecommerce sites. He is a seasoned entrepreneur with a broad range of experience in both consumer and enterprise technology companies, spanning online advertising and publishing as well as enterprise software.

Brian has co-founded multiple companies, successfully raised seed-capital, scaled organizations, and has been a key driver on both sides of a merger and acquisition transaction.

Early in his career, Brian was one of the pioneers of the online advertising industry, delivering highly scalable ad-serving, data processing and analytic architecture for aQuantive (now Microsoft Advertising), as well as the technology behind the advertising network for high profile, award winning web-properties managed by Disney Online (Starwave was acquired by Disney Interactive Media Group), including ESPN.com, ABCNews.com, Infoseek and Disney Online.

Brian has decades of experience in diverse leadership roles which have given him a unique blend of deep technology expertise, insightful strategic vision, pragmatic business acumen and proven organizational skills. Most recently, he served as VP Product Development for Software AG, the world's largest independent provider of business infrastructure software. Prior to Software AG, Brian was VP Product Development for webMethods, where he led product strategy and development for the Business Process Metadata Library. Brian came to webMethods through the acquisition of Network Inference/Cerebra where he was VP Engineering. Prior to Cerebra, Brian was a technology lead at Vulcan Inc., Paul Allen's private asset management company, where he was a key contributor to a number of programs in support of the portfolio.

Brian is also an active contributor to the Semantic Web Technology and Web 3.0 community as a frequent speaker and educator.