Christian Vanek
Co-Founder & CTO

An original co-founder of Widgix Software, Christian Vanek is a serial entrepreneur with a strong system and application design background. He’s spent the last 13 years creating technology to help marketers and researchers. One of those relentless tinkerers Christian is always building something better. His past successes have included Co-Reg Complete and SurveyGizmo, among other numerous private label applications.

In the past, he spent most of his time developing marketing and content tools for organizations such as SBC, AT&T, MarketingSherpa, DCI, Jellicle Investors, Boston University and the Glimpse Foundation. Now he works non-stop on SurveyGizmo’s back-end technology and system design.

Scott McDaniel
Co-Founder & CEO

Scott previously was Internet Director of MarketingSherpa. Prior to that he worked as Marketing Director of MessageMedia (an Email Service Provider aquired up by DoubleClick) and also headed the web design and development firm Decisive Communications. For Widgix, Scott concentrates on making applications more useful and easier to use. He does this using his expertise in usability and design gained from his years as an Internet marketing and development specialist with a background in graphic design.

Scott built his very first web page in early 1997, but all evidence of this has been destroyed to protect the innocent. He holds a Masters degree in Volcanic Geo-Chemistry (and honestly, we are not really sure what that means, just that he is a smarty). We are hoping that some day at Widgix, he might be able to apply that expertise to something so that he can finally prove the value of his formal education.

Derek Scruggs
VP of Client Services and Business Development

Derek is a Partner & the VP of Business Development at SurveyGizmo. Prior to joining SurveyGizmo, he was founder of the late, lamented Enthusiast Group, a network of user-generated content sites focusing on adventure sports. He has founded or co-founded numerous companies and worked in the Internet & software industries for 15 years.

A graduate of Northwestern University, Derek now lives in beautiful Boulder, Colorado.

Derek is so fabulously successful, witty, charming and just plain good-looking that he’s allowed to write his own bio.

Chad Shinsato
Senior Software Developer

As a client services developer at SurveyGizmo, Chad designs customized solutions for clients and is always awaiting the next analytical challenge. Chad is a developer that will pick over a problem with a fine-toothed comb. He’s a problem solver at heart and is always looking for the next mountain to climb (if only to ski back down it). He loves to play with data and one day (he claims), he’ll be able to predict the future—he’s currently building a master computer to do just that. If Chad won the lottery he would travel through Asia, build a massive house, and then spend all his time developing a practical lightsaber.

Toi McDaniel
Finance and Account Manager

At SurveyGizmo, Toi is our Finance and Accounting manager. She keeps our books balanced and our numbers crunched. Toi comes to us from Thailand where she was a highly skilled chef and cooking instructor. Toi still enjoys cooking (and holding SurveyGizmo cooking lessons!) and can even be seen in a Food Network Challenge. Someday, if she had the time, she would like to be a professional vacationer.

Mario Lurig
Client Services Engineer

Mario’s official title is Sales Engineer at SurveyGizmo, but you’ll find him sticking his hands into as many cookie jars as he can. From Technical Support to tutorials and documentation, he is always looking for new ways to help customers help themselves. Mario hails from Reunion, France off the coast of Madagascar in the middle of the Indian Ocean… no, really… then Kenya, United Arab Emirates, and finally Florida. If he won a million dollars he would probably lie about spending it frivolously on travel and fun, then tuck it away and live off the interest.

Brittany Heidtke
Marketing Manager

Brittany is a marketing manager for SurveyGizmo. She is a Jill-of-all-trades spreading the word about SurveyGizmo, hand-writing cards, concentrating on our SEO, running Adwords campaigns, monitoring analytics, and blogging. She hails from Chicago, has three dogs, Gracie, Molly, and Sophie, and plans to take full advantage of beautiful Colorado this summer and go camping as much as possible.

Jase Smith
Web Designer

Jase is the web designer for SurveyGizmo. A scary-tall guy with huge design skills. Jase has been the force behind the gradual, yet pervasive changes to the SurveyGizmo interface – making it cleaner, easier and more modern every day. Visit our office to observe Jase in his natural environment. The best place for a duck-blind is between the kitchen and dev room. Jase can be seen lumbering between these habitats each day, stopping occasionally to graze for red vines above the cube walls.

Jonathan Turk
Customer Account Manager

Jonathan is an Account Manager Ninja and a sales guru from the cable and satellite industry. He comes from an extensive background of customer-facing service and support. When Jonathan isn’t using his Katana to slice through customer problems, he can be found developing children’s video games, composing music, or watching reruns of Frasier.

Marybeth Alexander
Customer Support Team Leader

Marybeth is an Account Manager at SurveyGizmo, though she prefers the term “Customer Hero”. Previously, Marybeth taught middle school about 90 miles from Cuba in the Florida Keys. While she misses the long hours spent grading papers, she is happy to be at SurveyGizmo fulfilling her dream of being a real tech geek.

Jean-Francois Hardy
Senior Software Developer

Prior to working at SurveyGizmo, Jean-Francois was the senior software engineer for a New-York based online marketing agency. He has been developing software and working with online database systems for the better part of the last decade.

When he’s not swimming in the Matrix trying to improve the SG platform, he can be found (season depending) telemark skiing any of Colorado’s many mountain passes, riding his single-speed ‘niner in the hills around Boulder, or just relaxing and watching his vegetable garden grow. He also likes to watch his two kids grow, but they tend to move around way too much for that to be relaxing.

Samantha Harms
Marketing Manager

Samantha has been lucky enough to be involved in many aspects of the product lifecycle: from product management to quality engineering, to marketing, she is fond of saying she’s done “everything but the code.” She spends her spare time writing, tweeting, going to concerts, and enjoying the outdoors.

Sam moved here from Pennsylvania a few years ago, and while she doesn’t intend to offend any citizens from her lovely home state, you couldn’t pay her any sum of money to leave beautiful Colorado. Finally, she loves good spelling, defensive driving, music, and of course, technology.

Sarah Jennings
Customer Account Manager

Sarah is an account manager at SurveyGizmo. She comes from the exciting world of insurance account management and is happy to be in a more tech minded community. When Sarah isn’t busy solving customer questions she can be found pouring lots of great smelling candles and knitting miles and miles of scarves for everyone around her.

Dehru Cromer
Senior Software Developer

Dehru (pronounced Day-roo) is one of the new faces around the SurveyGizmo office. He brings an additional 11 years of software development experience to the development team. Dehru has been integral in several Boulder-based startups since moving to Boulder in 1997. He loves the fast pace of small and growing companies…oh, and wearing flip-flops to work.

Dehru is a tribal name given to him in Liberia, Africa, where he spent his first 10 years. Little know trivia fact about Dehru — He once played guitar on stage with U2 during the Joshua Tree tour.