Ben McDonald - Founder and Principal

Ben is one of the few people that blends technical expertise with social skills and is the perfect fit for any organization that is looking for someone who gets the whole picture and can also manage the technical aspects of any project.

Ben has been an early adopter of technology since birth. He first asked to stay after school to take computer classes when he was in 3rd grade. At one of the top 10 public high schools in the country, he exhausted the school's offerings of computer classes. For his senior elective, he graded other students' computer science projects. In college, Ben continued his study of software development and graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science.

Ben joined a leader in Ruby on Rails development, Hashrocket , as employee number 5 and worked closely with CEO and Founder Obie Fernandez and was instrumental in growing the company from 5 to 35 employees and from $0 to $6 million in revenue over 2 and a half years.

Before Hashrocket, Ben joined his good friend Darren Rush at Koders to provide development management and enterprise sales support. Koders offers a public search engine and an enterprise source code search tool installed behind the firewall, aimed at increasing code reuse within large IT organizations. In 2008, Black Duck Software purchased Koders and integrated it into their open source risk analysis suite.

Ben has also been involved in the design and implementation of many enterprise software projects. He helped develop Symantec's Anti-Spam appliance, a Microsoft ISA security server, a SMTP Gateway Email Security program, and a financial modeling application used by hedge funds to perform technical analysis of historical trends in the stock market

Navarrow Wright - Principal

With more than 17-years experience in the technology and media industry, Navarrow Wright has established himself as someone who can conceptualize and develop advanced technology solutions for leading global organizations. Wright’s unique understanding of the Internet space, and his ability to marry those technical advances with consumer demand, have placed him as one of the premier technology experts in Internet and media. He prides himself on showing youth how technology can be an enabler to help them achieve their dreams. He speaks to youth groups up and down the east coast for various organizations and was recently given a commendation from the city of Newark for his work with events that have a positive impact on young people. He has made it his mission to be a voice for technology adoption in underserved areas and to develop that entrepreneurial spirit in urban youth.

With hip-hop mogul, Russell Simmons, Wright co-founded a social media site that caters to the hip-hop perspective, GlobalGrind.com. Global Grind was partially funded by Accel Partners, the primary investors of Facebook. According to Wright, "Global Grind’s mission is to be a platform that allowed the urban audience to show its depth and breadth by allowing its talented and diverse members a place to find all the content that’s important to them, and giving creative entrepreneurs a place to monetize their content and showcase it to the largest audience possible. This network will be a significant value to advertisers who are eager to reach this unique audience in a targeted and meaningful way.” While at GlobalGrind.com, Wright also successfully launched a vertical ad network and associted celebrity blogger network.

Before joining Global Grind, Wright was SVP of Technology for Medical Broadcasting Company, a division of the Internet marketing firm Digitas Inc. Prior to that, he served as CTO of Viacom’s BET Interactive. At BET.com he created and implemented new technologies that promoted growth at the website by 300%, making it the leading entertainment online destination for African Americans. During his tenure at BET, Wright recognized the need for a platform that would showcase and promote all the creative content that is available on the net, thus providing an impetus for the creation of Global Grind.

Navarrow Wright has appeared on Run’s house , Irv Gotti’s Gotti’s Way and the Steve Harvey radio show. He was picked by Network Journal Magazine as one of their 40 Under forty professionals to watch in 2009 and selected by the Innovation Generation as one of the nation’s top 100 GenerationNEXT and Information Technology leaders.

Wright likes to consults with clients on the critical issues affecting the ways in which broadband and digital innovation can be used to enhance educational, entrepreneurial and economic pursuits, the improvement of healthcare services, and the delivery of entertainment services and political activism. “The digital space is always changing. There are more opportunities for success today than ever,” he says.

Wright holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Rider University in Computer Science.