Meet Our Advisors: Lars Perkins, Lee Torrens and Gilon Miller
Gearing up our token sale in June, we ‘re proud to introduce some of our advisors along with the relevant experience they bring to our journey at Wemark.
We’re building a new marketplace and expecting to disrupt a large industry. Naturally, we’re excited to have some of the brightest minds in content, and benefit from the experience they have already built with some of the biggest photo-based online businesses.
Lars Perkins, Founder and CEO of Picasa (now Google Photos)
These days, it’s hard to remember that once upon a time — not too long ago, actually — sharing photos meant having them developed at a lab and looking at them in person, or sending them via snail mail. Long before we could post our photos on Flickr or scroll endlessly through Instagram, Lars Perkins was building one of the first, and most popular, photo-based applications in the world: Picasa. Lars served as CEO of Picasa until it was sold in July, 2004 to Google, and he continued to lead Picasa as General Manager and then Director of Product Management at Google. Picasa eventually became part of Google Photos, one of today’s most widely used apps for sharing and storing photos.
After leaving Google in 2006, Lars helped Kodak build and launch Kodak Pulse, one of CNET’s “favorite products of all time,” as a strategy consultant and investor. He‘s a venture partner at 3Rodeo and an active advisor for Wemark, offering unrivaled insights on the photo industry.
Lee Torrens, Marketplace Director @ Canva
Millions of people turn to Canva every day to design invitations, business cards, flyers and more. Developed to make design simple and accessible for professionals and amateurs alike, Canva offers a tremendous number of templates, layouts and fonts. But there’s another, equally important, component: an exclusive trove of high-quality stock photos. For that, we have Lee Torrens to thank. Even before Canva launched, Lee had created a library of over one million stock images directly from contributors. As Marketplace Director, Lee is responsible for everything related to Canva’s stock photo collection, including licenses and terms as well as the product design for recruiting contributors, adding images and making them searchable.
Prior to Canva, Lee was the author of Microstock Diaries, where he reported on the microstock market and shared his experiences as a microstock photographer. He brings this invaluable knowledge to Wemark, advising on content strategy and acquisition.
Gilon Miller, Co-Founder and CEO @ GuruShots
For the busy photographer, focusing one’s time on shooting and editing photos, photography can be a lonely pursuit. Gilon Miller, the founder and CEO of GuruShots, thinks it can be livelier and more interactive. GuruShots is a game that connects and inspires photography enthusiasts of all levels and helps them become better photographers. Every day, new challenges go up on the site, and millions of photo enthusiasts from over 120 countries upload their submissions. Other users then vote on their favorites and share feedback, giving them a chance to test how the photos perform to a diverse and talented community, with the platform receiving over 600 million votes per month.
GuruShots has awarded over $400,000 in cash prizes, along with photography equipment and gear, and winners often have their work exhibited in galleries around the world. Prior to developing GuruShots, Gilon lectured on marketing and served in a variety of marketing roles at different organizations. As a Wemark advisor, he guides the company’s marketing and product efforts in recruiting photographers, and designing their experience on the platform.
We’re grateful for the invaluable wisdom and experience these three advisors bring to Wemark, to our team and to the marketplace we are building.
Learn more on https://www.wemark.com
