Management Team

Russ Carroll

CEO

While in his teens, Russ was a contemporary research astronomer, earning the highly regarded Westinghouse Science Award and, by age 17, made one of the first major astronomical discovery HEAO I X-ray satellite.  By the following year, Russ held full investigator status with NASA on the HEAO II while at the UCSD Center for Astrophysics and Space Science.

Astronomy led Russ to pioneering work with supercomputers, first at Boeing, then subsequently, in his first major entrepreneurial role as VP of computer services for Digital Productions, which won an Academy Award for 22 minutes of groundbreaking computer animation in the film The Last Starfighter.

In mid-1998, after leading several other successful supercomputing and software companies, Russ took over as CEO of a floundering three year old real estate training company.  Under his leadership over the next 4 years, the company went on to become the largest training and coaching company in the United States, growing from 18 employees to over 200.

Rick Wilson

Executive Vice President

Rick began with the original Miva Corporation (now Miva Merchant) in 1999 as Director of North American Sales. His responsibilities included channel sales and management, strategic partnership development and end user adoption. Rick took over as Vice President of Sales and Business Development in 2002. In 2007 he became Executive Vice President when the company was spun out of MIVA, Inc (formerly FindWhat) into a standalone entity. Today, Rick's duties include overseeing all parts of day to day operations with a specific focus on Sales, Marketing and Business Development. During his tenure at Miva Merchant, Rick has worked with thousands of web hosting companies to assist them in offering an ecommerce platform to their end users.

Rick's more than 12 years of executive-level sales and marketing experience also includes his tenure as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Providence Systems (now Buffini and Company), a privately held sales training company. At Providence Systems, Rick developed and executed the sales and marketing strategies that helped lead a successful corporate turnaround in the late 1990's.

Jon Burchmore

Chief Technology Officer

Mr. Burchmore has over 14 years in the computer industry in both technical and management roles. During Jon's tenure at Miva Merchant he's been the driving force behind the industry-leading technology used in Miva products. Jon organized a variety of internal systems and managed a team of developers who regularly brought quality products to market in a timely fashion. Prior to Miva, Jon was a developer at Hyland Software, one of the foremost electronic document management companies.

Mark T. Johnson

Vice President of Development

Mark Johnson has over 30 years experience working in software development. In this long career Mark has worked for many companies, ranging from the very small to the very large. He was on the staff of the computer laboratory at two major universities. Mark has worked in the mining, financial, healthcare, advertising, manufacturing, hospitality, and retail industries.

Mark’s work has been in operating system development, compilers, real time process control, transaction processing, embedded systems, database systems, large-scale transaction processing, online and web based applications including Miva Merchant. Mark has been the developer behind a large Miva Merchant store (www.runnersgear.com) for a number of years and is very familiar with our product line and our community.

David Roquemore

Vice President of Technology

David has 23 years of experience in Information Technology leading and developing new IT Departments. He successfully led many large projects, including Sempra Energy’s conversion to SAP during their merger between SDG&E and Southern California Gas Company.

David worked with Russ and Rick at a former company as the CIO during its rapid growth to a $55 million company. He developed his skills in the banking and financial services industry during the first 10 years of his career. Some of the notable companies in David’s portfolio include: World Vision, Shearson Leahman, Security Pacific Bank, ITT Residential Capital, and Sempra Energy.

Christopher Walt

Secretary and General Counsel

Chris Walt has been a practicing attorney for over 28 years. After graduating from Stanford University (BA, MA 1973) and obtaining his law degree from the University of California Berkeley School of Law (JD 1979), Chris joined a large San Diego law firm, where he became partner and practiced business and corporate law for 10 years. Since leaving the firm and establishing his own practice, Chris has continued to represent emerging and established companies in business, corporate and real estate transactional matters.