Our fearless leaders
The big-picture thinkers who take Nitro to new heights.
Executive Team
Sam Chandler
Founder & CEO
View Sam's bio »
Sam Chandler
Founder & CEO
Sam started his first company at 16, while still in high school, and his second at 21, while attending university. After founding Nitro with several friends in Melbourne in 2005, the once-tiny startup has gone on to become a Silicon Valley success story. Today, Sam leads a team of over 200 Nitronauts across the US, Australia, Europe and Asia, and every month, millions of people in nearly 200 countries use Nitro products.
Sam was the Ernst and Young Australian Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year for 2014. He's on a permanent leave of absence from Melbourne's RMIT University, where he studied business, after moving to San Francisco to establish Nitro's global headquarters. On the weekends, depending on the weather and the season, you’ll typically find him motorcycling, cycling or skiing.
Kurt Johnson
Exec Chairman & Acting CFO
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Kurt Johnson
Executive Chairman & Acting CFO
Kurt has more than 24 years of management experience, including public and private company leadership, initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, strategic investments, recapitalizations and venture stage investing.
Previously, Kurt was president and CEO of Fastclick (NASDAQ: FSTC). Under his leadership, the company tripled revenue to $85 million, completed a $75 million private placement offering and a $78 million IPO. Kurt then orchestrated the sale of Fastclick to ValueClick in September 2005, achieving a $285 million valuation. Before joining Fastclick, Kurt was CFO of ValueClick (NASDAQ: VCLK) and was instrumental in the company's growth from an early-stage enterprise to a $500 million international media technology company. Before ValueClick, Kurt was an investment banker with Olympic Capital Partners in Seattle.
Gina O’Reilly
Chief Operating Officer
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Gina O’Reilly
COO
Part of the Nitro team as COO since 2008, Gina has global responsibility for the Business Operations, Marketing, and People functions, including Employee Experience and Talent. With over 15 years of software industry experience, Gina seeks to attract, retain, and cultivate the best talent at Nitro. In order to accomplish this goal, she is passionate about developing a creative, challenging, fun, diverse, and inspiring work environment that makes every Nitronaut feel that his or her contribution helps grow the business. Prior to Nitro, Gina oversaw global sales and marketing at activePDF, a leading provider of server-side PDF solutions and developer tools.
Fluent in French, Gina holds an MBA from the University of Phoenix as well as a BA International Marketing & Languages from Dublin City University, Ireland. In her spare time, Gina loves good food and wine, keeping fit, travel, and plenty of California sunshine.
Sam Thorpe
Chief Product Officer
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Sam Thorpe
Chief Product Officer
Sam Thorpe joins us from Flow Kana, where he served as CPO, responsible for formulating Flow Kana's technology and data strategy to accelerate the responsiveness of all supply chain tiers. Prior to Flow Kana, Sam served as the Director of Product Strategy at Nitro, where he led strategy, customer research and innovation toward synthesizing and unifying Nitro's global product strategy, and played a key role in the fund raising of tens of millions of investment dollars.
Sam also previously built and led innovative, high-performance product organizations in start-up environments, including two different enterprise real estate systems that were acquired in succession by Fortune 500 companies. Sam holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology with a Business minor from Humboldt State University.
Maria Robinson
Chief Marketing Officer
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Maria Robinson
Chief Marketing Officer
As Nitro's first-ever Chief Marketing Officer, Maria Robinson will be driving growth and awareness of Nitro around the globe. Maria joins us from Imperva, where she served as Vice President of Growth Strategy. In this role, Maria was responsible for Marketing and SDR organizations leading brand, digital, demand, web, and ABM transformation, and transition to SaaS. She also founded the Imperva Women's Network to help foster greater diversity and inclusion in technology. Prior to joining Imperva, Maria held various leadership roles in high growth divisions at Intuit, LogMeIn, and Citrix as well as healthcare technology startups.
Maria earned her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Global Studies from Alverno College. She has spent time around the world living in New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, and Italy, before coming back to San Francisco where she pursues her personal passions as a yogi, a foodie, and a proud mother of two great kids.
Mark Flanagan
SVP, Global Sales
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Mark Flanagan
SVP, Global Sales
Mark joined Nitro in January 2020 as Vice President EMEA, and now serves as Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales, where he oversees all of Nitro’s global Sales, Customer and Revenue Operations. Mark is an accomplished executive with a proven track record of driving high performance and business transformation through focused execution, often in challenging and highly competitive market segments.
Prior to Nitro, Mark was a member of Marketo’s senior leadership team in EMEA responsible for accelerated growth across the region. He also served as Executive Vice President at Vistatec, a global professional services organization, where he headed up global sales, marketing & strategy. Mark has also held number of senior sales and marketing leadership positions in organisations such as PFH, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) & Hewlett Packard.
Mark holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree (Marketing major) and a Postgraduate Higher Diploma in Marketing Practice from the National University of Ireland, Galway.
David O'Donoghue
VP, Engineering
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David O'Donoghue
VP, Engineering
As Nitro’s Vice President of Engineering, David oversees the global engineering team across Dublin and San Francisco, as well as all Nitro products. With over 30 years of developing, coaching, and leading engineering organizations, David’s diverse experience in software development ranges from online poker to fashion retail. His most recent role was the Head of Engineering at Zalando Ireland, where he built the engineering department from zero to a team of 55.
Guided by the belief that traditional management techniques can hinder intelligent, creative employees, David studied human motivation within technology organizations while completing his Master’s degree in Work and Organizational Behavior. At Nitro, he’s committed to creating a cutting-edge work environment that benefits both customers and Nitronauts alike.
On most weekends, you’ll find David on the golf course, indulging (and occasionally swearing at) his newfound love for the game.
Leadership Team
Erica Johnson
VP, People
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Erica Johnson
VP, People
As Vice President of People at Nitro, Erica supports and advances the authentic culture that is Nitro. With over 15 years of experience in HR and Operations, she oversees employer branding and every aspect of the employee experience—from talent recruitment and onboarding to employee engagement and development. Guided by the mission to empower Nitronauts to do their best work, Erica helps uphold Nitro’s core values, ensuring an equal balance between the needs of the company and the employee.
In her spare time, you’ll find Erica dining her way through the Bay Area’s top epicurean destinations, wine tasting in Napa, or indulging in the latest Real Housewives drama.
Barry Jungels
VP Sales, North America
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Barry Jungels
VP Sales, North America
As VP of Sales for North America, Barry is responsible for leading Nitro’s revenue growth across the Americas region. His primary focus is the Mid-Market and Enterprise segments, where he’s helping Nitro win Fortune 500 logos at enterprise scale across tens of thousands of knowledge workers. Prior to Nitro, he led large enterprise sales teams at Oracle, IBM, and CA Technologies (now Broadcom), mostly in the technology infrastructure space. Whether it was on-premise, SaaS/IaaS, or a hybrid cloud approach to IT delivery, Barry and his teams worked with the office of the CIO to deploy cost-effective IT solutions to their internal and external customers. Dedicated to a customer-centric approach to sales, Barry balances high revenue-growth expectations with customer goals and objectives.
Barry holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Notre Dame, as well as a Master of Science in Computer Information Systems from Northwestern University. With dual U.S. and Luxembourg citizenship, he aspires to learn French to keep pace with his wife (who is already fluent) and two daughters (who are learning faster than their father).
Michael Helder
VP Sales, APAC
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Michael Helder
VP Sales, APAC
As VP of Sales, APAC, Michael focuses on driving Nitro’s revenue growth across the Asia-Pacific region. With 20 years of sales leadership experience at organizations like EMC, Fuji Xerox, and Viatek, he has extensive expertise in document workflow and digital transformation solutions. Michael brings a consultative style to management, helping team members uncover their full potential by inspiring, coaching, and challenging them to achieve their professional goals.
A family man and avid wine lover, Michael has an affinity for pinot noir and enjoys spending his spare time with his wife and two young daughters.
Eric Salas
Head of Marketing
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Eric Salas
Head of Marketing
As Head of Marketing, Eric oversees Nitro’s global marketing function—from demand generation, eCommerce, creative, and marketing operations to product, brand, digital, and enterprise marketing. With over two decades of B2B and B2C experience in client and agency leadership roles, Eric has worked with startups and global enterprises alike, including AAA, Visa, Symantec, Dole, and Nestle. Prior to Nitro, Eric was the Senior Director, Global Product Marketing at LiveOps, where he successfully launched a wide variety of new cloud products and customer-service applications.
An avid lover of travel and wine, Eric spends much of his free time in Sonoma, where he enjoys sipping pinot noir and playing with his two French bulldogs, Timo and Juno.
Jennifer Murray
VP of Customer Success and Solutions
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Jennifer Murray
VP of Customer Success and Solutions
As VP of Customer Success and Solutions, Jennifer is passionate about engraining our customer-centric culture into every facet of Nitro. Jennifer joined Nitro in 2016 to create the Customer Success function, and now oversees the end-to-end customer experience, including Customer Success, Solutions Engineering and Customer Support. With over 15 years of experience leading Customer Success and Customer Insights teams at organizations including C3 IoT, Zynga, and eBay, Jennifer is committed to ensuring our customers have a positive experience at every stage of their Nitro journey.
Born-and-raised in California, Jennifer spends as much of her free time as possible at the beach and is happiest when she has sand between her toes. Off-season, she enjoys hiking, skiing, travel, sporting events, and working her way through the Napa Valley wineries.
Peter Jones
VP, Design & User Experience
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Peter Jones
VP, Design & User Experience
As Nitro’s Vice President of Design & User Experience, Peter is responsible for how Nitro is experienced across all of its properties. From the moment someone discovers Nitro to their daily interaction with our products, his goal is to create endearing experiences that transform the way we work. With over a decade of product design, his work has reached millions of users across a wide range of industries. Influenced in part by his time as the co-founder of an award-winning video game company, he believes that any task can be made intuitive, engaging, and fun.
After several years in San Francisco, Peter lives on a historic homestead in New Hampshire with his wife and son along with a dog, a cat, some chickens, and several thousand honey bees. On the weekends, you’ll find him outside tending to the farm, making maple syrup, or in his woodshop.
Kevin O'Donnell
VP, Product
View Kevin's bio »
Kevin O'Donnell
VP, Product
As VP of Product at Nitro, Kevin leads the Product Management team and is responsible for product strategy, roadmap creation and go-to-market delivery. Kevin is a proponent of design-led innovation and leads teams to solve problems at-scale for the benefit of Nitro's global customer base.
Kevin has over 18 years’ experience in technology innovation, strategic leadership and delivering scalable, global solutions. Prior to Nitro, Kevin worked for Microsoft in Dublin and Seattle. He led teams to create enterprise-grade products and services for the globalization and localization of Windows software.
Kevin holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from University College Dublin. In his spare time, Kevin enjoys day-tripping around Ireland with his wife and two young daughters.
Board of Directors
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Sam Chandler
Executive Director -
Kurt Johnson
Executive Chairman -
Andrew Barlow
Independent Non-Executive Director -
Richard Wenzel
Executive Director -
John Dyson
Non-Executive Director -
Michael Brown
Non-Executive Director -
Lisa Hennessy
Independent Non-Executive Director -
Sarah Morgan
Independent Non-Executive Director
Sam Chandler
Sam started his first company at 16, while still in high school, and his second at 21, while attending university. After founding Nitro with several friends in Melbourne in 2005, the once-tiny startup has gone on to become a Silicon Valley success story. Today, Sam leads a team of over 200 Nitronauts across the US, Australia, Europe and Asia, and every month, millions of people in nearly 200 countries use Nitro products.
Sam was the Ernst and Young Australian Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year for 2014. He's on a permanent leave of absence from Melbourne's RMIT University, where he studied business, after moving to San Francisco to establish Nitro's global headquarters. On the weekends, depending on the weather and the season, you’ll typically find him motorcycling, cycling or skiing.
Kurt Johnson
Kurt has more than 24 years of management experience, including public and private company leadership, initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, strategic investments, recapitalizations and venture stage investing.
Previously, Kurt was president and CEO of Fastclick (NASDAQ: FSTC). Under his leadership, the company tripled revenue to $85 million, completed a $75 million private placement offering and a $78 million IPO. Kurt then orchestrated the sale of Fastclick to ValueClick in September 2005, achieving a $285 million valuation. Before joining Fastclick, Kurt was CFO of ValueClick (NASDAQ: VCLK) and was instrumental in the company's growth from an early-stage enterprise to a $500 million international media technology company. Before ValueClick, Kurt was an investment banker with Olympic Capital Partners in Seattle.
Andrew Barlow
Andrew was a founder of Hitwise, one of Australia's most successful global technology companies. Hitwise was one of the world's first "big data" companies, monitoring tens of millions of Internet users on a daily basis, and providing real-time competitive intelligence to Fortune 1000 customers globally. Hitwise was acquired by FTSE 100 company Experian (LSE:EXPN) in 2007 for US$245m.
Andrew is currently the Founder and Chairman of Adslot Ltd. Adslot provides automated ad sales solutions to online publishers, allowing them to sell premium ad inventory direct to agencies and advertisers. Adslot is publicly-listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX:ADJ), and has offices in Melbourne, Sydney, London, San Francisco, New York, Hamburg, Auckland and Shanghai.
Andrew was an early-stage investor in Nitro via his private investment company, Venturian, and has acted as an advisor and non-executive director to Nitro since January 2007. He loves the company, the people, and the team events. When he's not thinking about Adslot and Nitro, Andrew loves travelling with his wife and children, enjoying great food and wine with friends, and seeing how fast he can go in a race car (but not all at the same time).
Richard Wenzel
One of Nitro's founders, and now serving as VP of Strategic Operations, Rich is responsible for corporate operations, compliance, corporate governance, key treasury functions, and legal and shareholder affairs.
Prior to joining Nitro, Rich was an advisor at the Kerry Packer-controlled Challenger Group, in Melbourne. Rich returned to Melbourne from Milan, where he managed funding requirements for the Italian office of Bankers Trust (now part of Deutsche Bank AG), prior to which he was in London, where he worked as a trader in the treasury department.
Rich holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Melbourne, Australia.
John Dyson
John Dyson is one of the founders of Starfish Ventures and has overseen and managed investments in a range of technologies and industries. John has achieved numerous exits for his portfolio companies including a NASDAQ listing, ASX listings and trade sales to local and overseas companies.
John is a passionate alpine skier and is a former Chairman of Mount Buller and Mount Stirling Alpine Resort Management Board, which oversees the management of Victoria’s largest alpine resort. John was also the former Chair of Swinburne Ventures Pty Ltd (the entity responsible for the commercialisation of technology for Swinburne University of Technology). John is a co-trustee of the Dyson Bequest, a $16M Charitable Foundation that provides grants to a range of social welfare, education and environmental causes.
John holds a Bachelor of Science from Monash University, a Graduate Diploma in Finance and Investment from Securities Institute of Australia, Masters of Business Administration from RMIT University and is a Member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. John attended the Stanford University Executive Program in 2010.
John has been an active participant in the Australian venture capital industry. From 1997 to 2002, John was a Director of the Australian Venture Capital Association Limited, including Deputy Chairman in 1998 and Chairman in 1999. John is currently a Director of Aktana, Atmail, Audinate, DesignCrowd, Echoview (Myriax) and Nitro Software.
Michael Brown
Since joining Battery Ventures in 1998, Michael has made, or managed, multiple investments spanning the financial-services, enterprise-software and technology-enabled business-services markets. From 1996 to 1998, Michael was a member of the high-technology group at Goldman, Sachs & Co., where he worked on debt and equity financings as well as mergers and acquisitions. Previously, he was a financial analyst within Goldman’s financial-institutions group. There he focused on mergers and acquisitions within asset management, insurance, specialty finance and retail/mortgage banking.
Michael graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University with a dual BS in finance and international business.
Lisa Hennessy
Lisa is a highly experienced executive and company director with over 30 years of experience worldwide.
Lisa currently sits on the board of Planet Innovation, FirstStep Investments, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research Commercialisation Committee, and Arts Centre Melbourne Foundation and is also currently the President of the Harvard Club of Victoria.
Lisa was previously on the board of Murray River Organics (ASX:MRG) where she chaired the Remuneration and Nomination Committee. Prior to this, Lisa spent over a decade in strategy and M&A roles in the US, including Director of Strategy and M&A for Del Monte Foods, Director at GE Capital, and was also a Consultant at Bain & Company.
Lisa holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School and is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
Sarah Morgan
Sarah is an experienced public and private company director, particularly in an audit and risk capacity. She currently serves as a Non-Executive Director and Chairman of the Audit & Risk Committee of ASX listed Whispir, Hansen Technologies, and Adslot and serves as a Non-Executive Director of Future Generation Global Investment Company. She is a Non-Executive Director and Chairman of the Audit & Risk Committee of Intrepid Group.
Prior to becoming a company director Sarah spent over 15 years as an executive director of independent corporate advisory firm Grant Samuel, specialising in merger and acquisitions, public and private capital raisings and other forms of corporate financial advice.
Sarah holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) and a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Melbourne, and is a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
The management here at Nitro actually help you come to terms with what it is that you want to accomplish, then put in some structure so you can work toward those goals.”
There’s a very supportive aspect to our culture, and that probably goes back to one of our values: Be Good. We want to hire good humans, decent people who are going to be good to each other.”
Everyone on the Nitro team, day in and day out, is able to make a huge impact and build products used by millions of people.”
We try to create environments where people can work on their dreams and deliver on their ambitions.”
A day in the life
Whether we’re cheering at a Giants game, creating the next big thing in document productivity, practicing our yoga flow, or apple picking for charity, we have plenty of reasons to love coming to work every day.
