Kori Ashton
Kori Ashton has been listed as one of seven women who run tech startups in San Antonio to watch. She started her first company at the age of 12, and has had an entrepreneur’s heart ever since. She built her first HTML website in 1998, and was instantly hooked on Web design.
In 2012, Kori co-founded WebTegrity – a WordPress-focused Web design firm in San Antonio. She also teaches HTML, CSS, WordPress, SEO and other topics to hundreds of students at schools, colleges, and community classes across the United States. She now has an international audience via her WordPress Wednesday YouTube Channel.
Kori has spoken at WordCamp San Antonio, TEDx San Antonio, Graduation Ceremonies for The Art Institutes, Women Veteran Entrepreneurs, UTSA Small Business events, and hundreds of WordPress Meetups and workshops.
Christie Chirinos
Christie Chirinos was a co-founder of Ingot, which joined with CalderaWP to become Caldera Labs. She received her Master of Business Administration degree from Florida State University, specializing in information systems management. Christie lives in New York City with her cat, Snickers.
Kristen Wright
Kristen is a writer, artist and web designer from Oklahoma City. Living and breathing WordPress for the past five years, she handles content and email marketing for iThemes, as well as some front-end development for iThemes.com. She published a memoir in 2014 and is currently working on a new book for release in late summer 2016. She enjoys hiking, cooking, and drinking kombucha.
Lew Ayotte
Lew has been a Server Administrator and PHP developer for over a decade. In May of 2013, he joined the iThemes team as a plugin developer and loves it. He lives on a small farm in a small town in Georgia with his Wife, three kids, and a growing number of animals (24 and counting). Apart from coding, he enjoys hanging out with his family, eating delicious foods, making things, and listening to podcasts. He dislikes illogical arguments, laugh tracks, and corporatocracies.
Ronald Huereca
Ronald has been doing WordPress since 2006 and professionally since 2009. He has written numerous WordPress plugins and loves front-end and back-end WordPress development.
AJ Morris
Born in Michigan, raised by an entrepreneur, AJ has found his passion building applications that solve the needs of customers. He is the Director of WordPress for Liquid Web and works with a team of cross functional members to build and deliver WordPress hosting products to The SMB space. He’s been involved in WordPress since 2006 and has done everything from building custom theme and plugins to building and marketing WordPress products. When not doing WordPress he enjoys spending time with his wife and his newborn daughter.
Brad Griffin
The first time I saw the power of WooCommerce was about 7 years ago. A wonderful lady had a toy store, and needed to liquidate her existing inventory & close her store for health & financial reasons. At that point in my journey, I had used WordPress for about a year on various different sites, and I’d only read about WooCommerce.
Once her site was setup and all the WooCommerce aspects were correctly setup, I saw the power of WooCommerce and realized how it can have a meaningful impact on people.
Since then, I’ve grown in both understanding and application of WordPress and WooCommerce sites. While programming and code is an important aspect of WordPress, my heart still leans to the “people” side of websites.
Educating and empowering others with the knowledge of WordPress and WooCommerce brings joy to my heart.
Jessica Estes
After attending her first WordCamp (Austin) in 2014, Jessica began learning about WordPress and contributing to the project. Now she enjoys counting it as one of her hobbies, along with crocheting, exploring Oklahoma City, and working on catching all the Pokemon with her husband and young daughter.
Rebecca Gill
Rebecca is founder and president of Web Savvy Marketing. She has as a well-rounded business background within SMB and enterprise organizations, as well as over fifteen years of experience in sales, web development, and search engine optimization. She provides one-on-one coaching, teaches group SEO boot camps, and is an instructor at diyseocourses.com.
Mark Tilly
Mark Tilly is the CEO of Target Info, the developer of the top ranked MyCurator Content Curation WordPress plugin first introduced in 2012. Mark has over 30 years of software development experience. He founded iMany (now Revitas) with a partner in 1988 to build client server software for Pharmaceutical firms and grew it to over $30 million in sales and an IPO. He has been working with WordPress for 6 years building, marketing and supporting the AI based MyCurator plugin utilizing Amazon cloud services.
Susan Sullivan
Co-owner of Sumy Designs, a small business web design company. I represent the creative side of the Sumy team. This fact will impress you, even more, when you know I have degrees in English and Anthropology. That would be the “art” in Liberal Arts.
Sheryle Gillihan
Sheryle is Director of Partnerships @CauseLabs and Co-Founder/Purpose Ambassador @PurposeWP.
She is passionate about creating positive social impact, empowering purpose-driven organizations, and excels in developing strategies for business growth, reach and partnerships particularly with technology. Find her on Twitter @sgillihan.
Andrew Wikel
Andrew Wikel is a WooCommerce ninja at Automattic. He is committed to open source values and loves working with WordPress. He fell in love with WordPress in 2008, and has been working with it in some capacity since then. A husband, a father, a WordCamp addict, a coffee snob, lover of shiny things, and a California native living in Illinois.
Gary Leland
Gary moved to Texas from South Carolina in 1979. Arriving in Texas with less than $10 in his pocket he immediately started a new job as a door to door salesman selling storm windows and doors.
He married Kathy Morey and has now been married 32 years. and in 1981 he and Kathy opened their first retail store selling decorating products. Today Leland’s Wallpaper is not only still in business, but is the largest wallpaper store in Texas.
In 1996 everyone told Gary that creating a website to sell wallpaper was not only crazy, but stupid. One manufacturer told him ” No one will by wallpaper on the Internet.” So he created his first e-commerce website that same year and it was an immediate success. As Gary always says “Free advice is worth what you paid for it.”
In 2000 Gary created SoftballJunk.com which was the first website for women’s fastpitch softball equipment. He coached a softball team for his daughters and had a hard time finding equipment for the team, so he created his own store.
Gary had no idea that moving into the world of softball equipment would change his life forever. He not only became a celebrity in this niche, and the softball videos he has edited and produced have been viewed Millions of times on You Tube.
Darren Ladner
I am a Web Developer/Designer specializing in custom WordPress plugins and themes. I consider myself a hybrid developer with 60% back-end and 40% front-end experience. I work full-time at a Marketing company where we build MANY custom WordPress sites but also build other PHP applications using Laravel or CodeIgniter. I have three plugins in the WordPress plugin directory and have a couple of Commerical plugins and a commercial theme. I have been building websites since 2007 where I started as a .NET developer building .NET websites. Then I found WordPress in 2010 and found where I wanted to be.
Aaron D. Campbell
Aaron has over sixteen years of web development experience. He has been a regular contributor to WordPress for the last nine years, and even co-lead the WordPress 3.6 release. Aaron has worked with clients ranging from small local businesses to Google, Yahoo, Disney, and Harvard. He’s been called both a coffee snob and a beer snob, but considers both to be compliments. When not buried in code, he enjoys spending time with his wife and son, riding his motorcycle, and reading sci-fi/fantasy books.
Torre Kean
Torre Kean is Owner and Lead Creator at Hooked On Code, a WordPress specialized web consulting agency in Dallas. She considers herself a “geeky, panda loving, overachieving, obsessively ethical WordPress enthusiast.” For the past 5 years she has been focusing on WordPress website development for businesses and entrepreneurs. She has a degree in Marketing from Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business, and worked for Sewell Automotive Companies in Digital Marketing for a few years after graduating college. She believes that her education and experience in the marketing industry have given her a unique foundation that allows effective consulting in a broad range of areas.
Torre loves building WordPress websites, but she really loves working with clients who are just starting a company, because then she gets to help with things like like business conception, branding, revenue generation, public personas, in addition to simply building a website. Her favorite thing in the world right now is her baby boy (“Nugget”) who is 11 months old and the most amazing creature on the planet.
Pat Ramsey
Building relationships is key to any successful partnership, be it in business or life in general. At Crowd Favorite, Pat gets to do that every day as Director of Ongoing Client Support, where he leads a team providing development support, consultation, and strategy for enterprise clients. Pat has been a development director, an independent WordPress developer, a freelancer, and more.
When he’s not building websites, Pat can be found organizing the Austin WordPress Meetup or helping with the tech networking community, Refresh Austin. He’s been a trainer and advisor for Knowbility’s Accessible Internet Rallies and AccessU, and a founder the WordPress conference “after-after” party, CigarCamp. Pat is a former Navy Reserve sailor, a native Texan, and enjoys cooking large quantities of crawfish.
Anna Wickham
Anna Wickham is founder and owner of content marketing company Charm House Marketing. Charm House focuses on creating and executing content marketing strategies that drive revenue and conversions, not just awareness and engagement. Charm House does this by prioritizing marketing strategy before even lifting a finger to execute, and then relying relentlessly on analytics throughout the project, allowing for the agility to pivot for ultimate effectiveness.
Anna’s success in growing her now 4-person team from 6 different countries in 18 months attracted the attention of Business Insider, which featured Anna in 2015. Anna speaks around the country and the world on content marketing strategy for small biz, social media marketing, personal branding, and one of her favorite topics, location independent entrepreneurship. After traveling the world on and off for 10 years, she has just recently moved back to her hometown of OKC.
What people are saying about Anna’s speaking:
“Anna is very passionate, dynamic, and extremely knowledgeable in marketing, personal branding, and entrepreneurship.”
“Energetic and engaging”
“Every word of Anna’s presentation had an impact.”
“Anna’s radiant personality, determination, and marketing expertise are certain to motivate even the most persistent skeptic.”
Logan Kipp
Logan has been an intermittent WordPress user since “Strayhorn” 1.5 in 2005 and has used WordPress as a primary platform since “Coltrane” 2.7 in 2008. Logan has over seven years experience in the website hosting and security technology field, starting with three years at GoDaddy, followed by four years at SiteLock. Logan most recently served as SiteLock’s Lead Security Analyst before taking his current role as a Product Evangelist – WordPress earlier this year.
Keanan Koppenhaver
Keanan Koppenhaver is a Digital Product Developer and Consulting Engineer with doejo, a WordPress VIP Partner Agency.
While at doejo, he has worked on baking WordPress into the publishing workflow of one of the largest investment news publications in the United States, a WordPress-backed real estate investment portal, and many other projects large and small.
He is passionate about mentoring other developers as well as teaching people that WordPress can be more than just a blogging platform.
Patrick Garman
Patrick Garman is a Sr. eCommerce Specialist at ColourPop Cosmetics, one of the fastest growing e-commerce stores around. Formerly a WooCommerce extension developer, WooCommerce Ninja at WooThemes, and a developer at WebDevStudios & Maintainn, altogether giving Patrick a unique set of skills and experience in e-commerce, product development, enterprise WordPress development, and scaling of WordPress & WooCommerce.