Rob Schmults Joins Our Advisory Board
July 11th, 2008 by Brett Hurt | Founder and CEO
I am very proud that Rob Schmults joined our Advisory Board (announced this week). I have know him for almost ten years, dating back to the beginning of Coremetrics (the company I founded and a Bazaarvoice partner) and Fort Point Partners (where Rob was responsible for their retail consulting practice). Note: Fort Point Partners turned into Offermatica, which was recently acquired and repackaged by Omniture, another Bazaarvoice partner.
There are few in the industry that I hold in such a high regard. Rob has been a huge contributor to Shop.org (where I serve on the Board of Directors) over the years. Recently, his brother, Ed Schmults, the CEO of FAO Schwarz, stepped up when we were in a pinch to serve as our keynote speaker at our January Strategy & Innovation Forum (renamed and refocused this year). Ed was awesome, by the way. Recently, Sam Taylor, Oriental Trading’s new CEO and a fellow Shop.org Board member, told me that Ed’s presentation had a huge influence on him, as both Oriental Trading and FAO Schwarz are owned by private-equity firms. But to just give that example of a recent Shop.org contribution wouldn’t be doing Rob justice. He has spoken at many of our events at Shop.org over the years, and has consistently been rated as one of our best speakers. In addition to serving on the Board at Shop.org, I also serve on the Executive Content Committee (a subset of their Content Committee) with Rob. I can tell you firsthand that some of our best ideas for topics and speakers come from Rob and his network.
I know that Rob will help us accelerate the growth of Bazaarvoice even more. His connections in eCommerce are truly extraordinary because he is one of the most trusted in our industry. Like me, he officially started his “Internet” career in 1994. There are few that I know that have been in this field for as long as Rob. He genuinely cares about the evolution of eCommerce and retail. He had one of the most challenging, and important (from a revenue and client service/retention perspective), executive jobs at GSI Commerce.
If you haven’t checked out the rest of our Advisory Board members, please do. The executive team and I are truly humbled to work with such an amazing group of individuals. They have been a huge part of our success over the past three years.
