Ursa Minor is a fellowship of designers, strategists, and storytellers who share a passion for media, technology, and changing the world. We have come together from diverse backgrounds in filmmaking, television, web technology, video games, music, and advertising.
Management Team
Benjamin De Pauw: Founder / Chief Innovation Officer
Benjamin has over twenty years of experience in media production. In 1989 he founded a small recording studio, Conscious Sound Productions, which became one of the Bay Area's most sought-after audio houses, serving artists and record labels across the musical spectrum, and corporate clients such as Sega, Hewlett Packard, Fox, and Disney. Benjamin's creative vision and expertise has propelled the success of numerous commercial albums, web sites, media workflow processes and software products. In 2002, he founded Ursa Minor to meet expanding multi-media demand.
Lion Isis: Co-founder / CEO
Lion is a design strategist and entrepreneur. Prior to Ursa Minor Lion founded Falling Fruit TV where he launched a platform for progressive multimedia content and pioneered a new approach to niche online advertising. His academic background is very broad and interdisciplinary, covering the social sciences, psychology, philosophy, marketing, and design. He has experience managing large, concurrent media projects and overseeing globally distributed teams of creative, technical, and strategic personnel. His primary expertise lies in business, marketing, and brand strategy, as well as software and system design.
Matt Carlson: Executive Producer
Matt is a seasoned web producer, product manager, and user experience designer. Matt's prior experience includes creating the interactive department at a real estate focused marketing agency as well as producing award-winning web and video work at both the regional and national levels. Matt has also worked in the MediaWorks department at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, and holds degrees in Film and Philosophy from Washington University.
Eric Mansur: Chief Creative Officer
Eric has extensive background in the production, writing, and directing of film and other large media pieces. His experience was gained by working next to some of the film industry's top filmmakers including, Gus Van Sant, Cameron Crowe, James L. Brooks, Tom Cruise, Stephen Sommers, and Wayne Wang. Most recently, Eric applied his expertise to defining and implementing the corporate visual and brand identity for BRES Advisors, Inc., and produced the feature film, Sensored.
Ryan Rigoli: VP of Marketing
Ryan is a brand strategist and marketer with extensive experience launching consumer brands. Ryan has more than 15 years of brand marketing experience and has held leadership and management positions at Yahoo!, Homestead.com (now a subsidiary of Intuit) and IRI Inc. While Senior Director at Yahoo, Ryan was responsible for marketing strategy, planning and campaign execution of the highest priority initiatives on the Yahoo! Network to desired consumer segments. Ryan is also the co-founder and VP of Marketing for Beta Universe.
Robert Parzival: VP of Operations
Robert has previously held the Director of Operations position at Jennings and Keefe, and most recently at BMR Associates. His practical business skills include high-level executive support, project management, research, bookkeeping, cash-flow management, and office administration. Robert had the good fortune to study at the Master?s level with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and Joseph Heller, which he has applied to the creation of marketing and sales materials, e-newsletters, and website content. Robert has also spent many years leading seminars and trainings in interpersonal communications and relationships.
Advisory Board
Bud Koch
Bud has nearly 20 years of high-tech business and technology experience from product management to business and strategy leadership to software architecture and development. Bud began his career at Arthur Andersen & Co. where he lead an initiative of Computerized Financial Auditing for improved organizational efficiencies. In Australia and the US he contributed to IBM and Sun across every facet of product and brand management for servers, network equipment, software and services. He was fortunate to also apply his experience in best practice implementations of Product Life Cycle (PLC), ITIL Services Management and industry solutions. At Sun Microsystems his contribution to Sun's overall Web 2.0 strategy was a notable achievement. Over his career Bud continued with software development and design as a passion focusing on open-source and internet technologies. Since 2005, he has helped clients in their business and technology challenges with large scale solutions as a developer, systems architect, and project leader. Recent projects have included enterprise class storage technology solutions at SGI, Oracle 11i implementation leadership as well as Cloud Computing strategy at Sun Microsystems. Bud holds a BE in Engineering, Post Grad Diploma in Finance & Economics and an MBA from Melbourne University. Bud also gained his 'PHP Engineer' certification from Zend in early 2009.
Neal Rogin
Neal Rogin is an Emmy winning, Oscar-nominated writer, film maker and social observer whose work has had an impact on millions of people around the world. His latest film, The Awakening Universe, based upon the Universe Story by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, explores how the New Cosmology is changing the very definition of what it means to be a person. He is a member of the board of directors of The Pachamama Alliance, a non-profit partnership between people from the modern world and indigenous people in the Amazon region of Ecuador, and is part of the development team that has created the Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream Symposium, the purpose of which is to bring forth and environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just human presence on this planet as the guiding principle of our time.
William Moulton
Bill Moulton has been a high technology hardware and software publishing operations manager, developer, and business workflow systems engineer in the high technology and multimedia industry for over 25 years. He has designed and brought to market over 50 consumer software and hardware products, and managed large teams through successful product roll-out. He has patents and patents-pending in image, video, and audio technology for deployment in PSTN, internet networks, search software and information visualization technology, and in digital film and video media. Bill shines in the step by step implementation of ideas into manifested form, and in design invention and solution. His warm leadership style is perfect for Ursa Minor's fast-paced production environment.
