High Gear Media is an automotive publisher that connects car-seeking audiences with content and tools that facilitate decision making.
High Gear Media, a vertical media company publishing engaging, premium automotive content on some of the Webs fastest growing car websites.
High Gear Medias owned and operated automotive destinations have over 5.0 million visitors monthly and include its car review site, TheCarConnection.com, its luxury and performance site, MotorAuthority.com, and the leading green car site, GreenCarReports.com.
High Gear Medias editorial staff and contributors have written at publications such as Car and Driver, AOL Autos, AutoWeek, Automobile Magazine, and Wired. The companys content is syndicated to partners including the Washington Post, Yahoo! Autos, Fox News, Discovery News, SpeedTV and The San Francisco Chronicle. High Gear Media is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. and received its funding from Accel Partners, Greylock Partners and DAG Ventures.
Rob Solomon is President of Groupon, a social commerce startup based in Chicago.
Previously, he was a Partner at Technology Crossover Ventures, which he joined in October 2008. Before that he served as CEO of [Sidestep](/company/sidestep), a travel search site that was bought by [Kayak](/company/kayak).
During his time at SideStep, Mr. Solomon strengthened the management team, added distribution partnerships, and executed a successful growth strategy that included a number of accretive acquisitions. His efforts led to the merger of SideStep with Kayak.com in December 2007, creating the fifth largest Internet travel brand worldwide.
Prior to SideStep, Mr. Solomon spent six years at Yahoo where he was Senior Vice President of Commerce & Vice President and General Manager of the Yahoo! Shopping Group (YHOO) and was instrumental in building one of the largest commerce destinations on the Internet. Earlier in his career Mr.
Chas Edwards is chief revenue officer at [Luminate](/company/luminate). Previously he was the publisher and chief revenue officer at [Digg](/company/digg), the site that lets its 38 million readers organize content from across the web by voting on what they consider to be the best. For the four years prior to joining Digg, he was the co-founder (with John Battelle), publisher and chief revenue officer at [Federated Media](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/federatedmedia) (FM), a next-generation media and publishing company that connects the highest quality conversational content (eg, Boing Boing, Mashable, Inhabitat, Dooce, NOTCOT and The Pioneer Woman) with leading brand marketers.
Prior to co-founding Federated Media in 2005, Chas was vice president of sales and marketing for CNET Networkss B2B Portfolio, managing the team representing News.com, ZDNet and TechRepublic to business-to-business marketers.
Andrew Braccia joined Accel in 2007 bringing with him a decade of operational and leadership experience. His primary areas of investment interest include Consumer Internet and Software businesses with a focus on web search, digital media, online gaming and online advertising. Andrew currently sits on the board of Cloudera, the distributor of the popular Apache Hadoop open source software package, OpenX, the world’s leading Open Source Ad Server, High Gear Media, a next generation automotive content and advertising network, SB Nation, the fastest growing network of sports communities, and TRUSTe, the leading internet privacy services provider. Andrew also led Accel’s investment in Tiny Speck, the maker of the online game Glitch and currently helps lead Accel’s investment activity in the FB Fund.
James Slavet is a partner at Greylock. His primary areas of investment focus are e-commerce, online advertising, and Web-enabled consumer services. James’ investments include Cardspring, Coupons.com, Groupon, High Gear Media, One Kings Lane, Redfin, and TellApart. He previously represented Greylock in its investments in Revision3 (acquired by Discovery Communications), Auditude (acquired by Adobe), Farecast (acquired by Microsoft) and Kongregate (acquired by Gamestop). James was named to the 2012 Forbes Midas List which recognizes top VC tech investors. His complete profile can be found at LinkedIn [here](http://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesslavet).
Jeff Birkeland leads product development at High Gear Media. Previously, Jeff was senior director of product in Yahoos Media Group, leading product teams building such properties as Health, Tech, Food and Yahoo Shine. Prior to that he spent four years leading product management for Yahoo! News, where he developed strategy and product roadmap during the time it accelerated from #4 to #1 in the market and more than tripled revenue. In a past life Jeff was a documentary television producer.
VP of Engineering at High Gear Media
Armitage began his career as a successful exploration geoscientist. He was responsible for significant field discoveries in the Midwest and the Rockies. A strong background in computer science led him to start his own technology firm, GeoGraphix, at the dawn of the personal computer era. Armitages conviction was that manual drafting and management of subsurface data would quickly be supplanted by sophisticated 3D modeling software.
During his tenure, GeoGraphix became the worlds leading provider of desktop mapping and enterprise data interpretation systems to the upstream oil and gas industry. GeoGraphix was acquired by Halliburton in 1995. Armitage has founded and led other high-tech ventures including Qubit Technology, iPremise, and A2D Technologies. In 2002, while CEO of A2D, the worlds largest provider of digital well logs, he helped facilitate the sale of the firm to TGS/NOPEC, a large Norwegian seismic acquisition company.
Hesky Kutscher is co-founder and chairman of MotherKnows and the proud father of two young children. Hesky has always been an advocate of giving more information to consumers to make better purchasing and lifestyle decisions. His company, DailyShopper.com, became ShopLocal after a merger and then was acquired by Tribune and Gannett in 2004. Hesky founded High Gear Media in 2007, a large and growing network of automotive sites and blogs. Hesky is always very vocal about how health records belong to the patients as well as the doctors and he is very passionate about finding solutions to the challenges of health data.
Lead Designer at High Gear Media
CTO and co-founder in High Gear Media.