Advisory Board

David Mathison, MIA

David Mathison, MIA is the CEO and founder of the CDO Club and CDO Summit. David is the world’s leading authority on Chief Digital and Data Officers and has been quoted recently by American Banker, CIO.com, CIO Journal, CIO-UK, CMSWire, CNBC, Computer Weekly, Computerworld, Deloitte, Diginomica, EdTech Magazine, eMarketer, FedTech Magazine, FierceCIO, Financial Times, Forbes, Guardian, Huffington Post, I-CIO, McKinsey & Company, Media Post, MIT Sloan Management Review, VentureBeat, Wall Street Journal, and ZDNet, among others.

David was previously the founder and Managing Director of the Digital Media practice at Chadick Ellig, a premiere executive search consultancy named by Business Week as “one of the world’s most influential headhunters.”

His book, Be the Media, was featured in the NY Times after he pre-sold over 5,000 copies in 11 days via his website, Twitter, and Facebook. He has been the Publisher and CEO of BE THE MEDIA for the past 17 years.

From 1999 to 2001, he was founder and CEO of the Kinecta Corporation where he raised $30 million in under 2 years. Kinecta was acquired and is now part of Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL).

From 1994 to 1999, Mathison was Vice President with Thomson Reuters, the world’s largest news agency, where he pioneered online content syndication.

He served from 2010 to 2013 on the Board of Directors for HomeAid America, which builds and renovates multi-unit shelters for America’s temporarily homeless families and individuals and Speakers Without Borders, an international nonprofit created to support professional speakers who are committed to inspiring the human spirit in underserved communities though the power of the spoken word.

He has given keynote presentations everywhere from Columbia University to the United Nations (3 times in 2010), from Amsterdam to Zagreb.

Mathison earned his Master’s degree in International Affairs, International Business, East Asian Studies, and Japanese from Columbia University in 1995 and earned his Bachelor of Art’s degree from State University of New York College at Brockport in 1984.

His track record of successful exits & acquisitions is very impressive:

  • In 1989 he was the 7th person hired at Ovid Technologies, which provided natural language interfaces to medical databases such as MEDLINE. Ovid went public and in 1998 was acquired by Wolters Kluwer for $200 million.
  • During 1994–1998 he was VP of Global Syndication at Reuters, where he pioneered online content syndication years before RSS was invented.
  • At his second startup, in 1998, he was Cofounder, CEO, and Chairman of Kinecta Corporation, where he raised USD $30m in under two years over three rounds with blue chip investors such as Adobe, Canaan Partners, Fidelity, and Reuters. Kinecta was acquired by Stellent in 2002, which was acquired by Oracle in 2004 for $440 million.
  • In 2011 he founded the CDO Club, the world’s largest community of C-suite digital and data leaders. The CDO club has over 5,000 global registered members, including Chief Digital Officers, Chief Data Officers, Chief Analytics Officers, CEOs, CMOs, CIOs, CHROs, and CTOs.
  • In 2013, he created the first event specifically to serve those communities, the CDO Summit. They have since held CDO Summits in NYC (for 6 years), London (4th year), Sydney, Tokyo, Tel Aviv (3rd years), Istanbul, Amsterdam, D.C., and Toronto.
  • He was a seed investor in Revere Data, which was acquired by Factset Research for $15 million in 2000.

David speaks English, Spanish, and Japanese.

Read his LinkedIn profile. Visit his Facebook page. Follow his Twitter feed. Visit his Wikipedia page. Watch his YouTube channel. Browse his CDO Club website and CDO Summit website.