Our Company History
SiteWit was founded in 2009 by Ricardo Lasa and Dr. Donald Berndt with the mission of finding a way to objectively measure the quality of internet traffic. Ricardo was at the time Chief Executive Officer of Web Piston Website Builder and Don was sitting on Web Piston's advisory board.
Since then, the founders have put together a team of the best and brightest software engineers, data mining experts, and business people to put together a next generation PPC bid management and behavioral analytics suite.
The result is SiteWit.
Our Team
Ricardo Lasa – Co-Founder, Chief Executive OfficerRicardo is a hard working serial entrepreneur that is highly involved in the technology and business community in Tampa Bay. Prior to co-founding SiteWit, Ricardo started Web Piston Website Builder, now one of the leading platforms for small businesses to build their website and market their products and services. Through running Web Piston Ricardo realized there had to be a better way to buy paid search and started to work on SiteWit with Don in 2006. Web Piston is a thriving company built on sound business principles, profitable and growing even in these dire times of the “Great Recession.” Ricardo is focusing all his efforts now in growing SiteWit and helping Search Engine Marketing firms provide better online marketing for their clients through a simple and cost efficient mechanism.
Ricardo holds a bachelors degree in Management information systems, a Master of Business Administration with emphasis in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, and International Management, and a Master of Science in Management Information Systems with emphasis on Database Architecture and User Interface Design, all from the University of South Florida Business School. Ricardo also attended the Harvard Business School Launching New Ventures program in 2009 and is looking forward to joining the HBS Owner/President Management program in 2010. Ricardo sits on the board of directors of the Tampa Bay Technology Forum, the advisory board of the Management Information Systems from the University of South Florida Business School, and the board of directors of Filasa, a real estate development firm headquartered in Madrid, Spain.
Don Berndt ph.D – Co-Founder, Chief Scientist
Don is a professor in the College of Business at the University of South Florida. His research interests are centered on business intelligence technologies such as data warehousing, data mining, and text mining. A particular emphasis of his work is the application of these technologies in healthcare, including data and text mining for electronic medical records. More recent work has focused on information markets as another mechanism for prediction and collective intelligence (working together with Ricardo on Agorx). He has published more than 75 research papers on these topics and worked with a number of entrepreneurial technology firms, as well as other organizations throughout his career.
His first exposure to entrepreneurism was a position as a LISP programmer at Cognitive Systems, an artificial intelligence start-up associated with Yale University. That was followed by work in scientific computing and healthcare analytics at other companies. Working with Ricardo on SiteWit has provided an opportunity to apply data warehousing and data mining technologies to website traffic analysis and the development of learning algorithms for managing paid search. Don received his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the Stern School of Business at New York University and M.S. in Computer Science from Stony Brook University.
Jesse Baynard – Lead E-Commerce Developer
Jesse holds a Masters degree in Information Systems from the University of South Florida. Since graduating in 2000, Jesse’s primary focus has been in turning complex business problems into simple and effective technology solutions. These solutions have spanned across numerous vertical markets including healthcare, back office management, and e-commerce. Now as a member of the SiteWit management team, Jesse is dedicated to bringing clarity and expertise to the problem of search engine marketing inefficiencies. Intrigued by the power of mining behavioral analytics in predicting behavior, Jesse believes that this technology is the best automated approach for a problem that is far too complicated for click-through or simple ROI ratios alone. In his spare time he is involved in the Tampa Bay area tech community, an avid photographer and parent of two children.
Matt Munday – Lead Software Developer
Matt is SiteWit’s lead developer with many years of experience in designing, building and implementing web and backend applications for e-commerce and web development that have been tremendous business successes. Matt is an avid programmer who spends a lot of his free time creating applications for Google’s Android Os, designing and creating templates and plugins for Wordpress and a template for Zenphoto, and working with open source projects such as Snark. Matt has deep level expertise in Java, C++, C#, VB.NET, PHP & TSQL.
Chris Lord – Lead Business Systems Developer
Chris is a detail oriented software developer with extensive experience in e-commerce development. Before working on Site Wit Chris developed a major shopping cart platform used by thousands of business owners in several countries. He developed the billing, customer management, and customer communication systems for Web Piston Website Builder and many customized e-commerce solutions for businesses in vastly different markets. Chris also oversees the network and hosting infrastructure of SiteWit and its cloud implementation. He has received certifications from both CIW and Microsoft.
The team has been working together for over 10 years and we greatly enjoy working with each other, as crazy as that might seem!
