Venkates Swaminathan

Venkates "Swami" Swaminathan is the founder and CEO of LifeLaunchr, the world's first virtual coaching platform for college planning. Prior to LifeLaunchr, Swami was in charge of all national earned revenues at GreatSchools. His role there included driving advertising sales, sponsorships, and licensing. GreatSchools, the nation's leading education-focused parenting site, drives parental engagement in education by providing information about schools and content to help parents. Prior to his tenure at GreatSchools, Swami led business development at Plaxo, Inc., in Mountain View, CA, where he focused on generating revenue and user growth through distribution and integration alliances worldwide. He grew revenues over 100% YoY and closed a major deal with Comcast that led to the company's profitable acquisition by Comcast in 2008. Swami founded and was EVP in charge of marketing and business development, and chief strategist at NightFire Software, which was acquired by NeuStar in 2003. NightFire raised over $50 million in venture capital from Sequoia Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Technology Partners, and The Roda Group. At the time of its acquisition, NightFire was operationally profitable, with revenues exceeding $20 million annually. Before NightFire, Swami was director of marketing at Telesphere solutions, a subsidiary of ADC Telecommunications based in Minneapolis; and held various engineering, marketing, and program management roles at TCSI Corp. in Berkeley; and architected their flagship product, Object Services Package (OSP). Swami earned a Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, New Delhi, India, and a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.