Andy Halliday

Summary

The son of an Air Force B-52 Aircraft Commander, I spent my high school years in Tachikawa Japan when my father became a 747 Captain for JAL. After graduation from Dartmouth, I spent 6 years in the Ski Industry, and became the Director of Skiing at Sunshine Village, outside Banff. In 1981 I went to Harvard Business School, then spent 12 years in Specialty Chain Store Retailing at an NYSE company with 3500 stores. There I learned profit planning, merchandising, and was made a division President with multi-functional general management responsibility. When the company planned an entry into experiential retailing in 1989, I was made the President of the Entertainment Group, which began with the acquisition of a then-2-store-chain called Dave & Busters. By 1995, as the parent company suffered declines in the face of mall-based competition from The Limited and The Gap, and off-mall competition to our shoe businesses from discount warehouse shoe stores, D&B was spun off as a separate public company, and the other divisions of the Entertainment Group were sold off in the parent company bankruptcy. In the wake of that, I was offered a position at Disney as an SVP in the Imagineering unit of Disney Development, and also a position as SVP Strategic Development at Simon Property Group, the country’s largest Mall REIT. To be closer to my sons from a previous marriage, I chose SPG, and there I became co-President of Simon Brand Ventures. Three years later, in 1998, I jumped to Silicon Valley from the midwest as the first VP GM eCommerce at Excite.com. After 2 years there and the merger with @Home--which was ultimately a bust--I became the CEO of a networked contact management startup called Contact.com. We likened the Contact.com product back then to an online "facebook" like those used by law and professional services firms. After Contact.com folded in the dot-bust of April 2000, I became the first COO of In-Q-Tel, the Intelligence Community’s venture-funding arm. Between 2000 and 2015, I was the founder or CEO of valley startups which together received $18MM in venture funding: Contact.com, OurStory.com, TagVault.org, and the student-community mobile app "erodr". In that same period I was also an executive team member of enterprise software startups Spoke.com, MerchantCircle.com, and Reply.com. In 2011 I met the co-founders of LIFEAID and became an advisor as they sought initial funding and commencement of operations. By 2015 the FITAID brand was taking off online and in Crossfit Gyms, and I joined as full-time COO.