Evan Beard is an American entrepreneur, engineer, and co-founder with

Ashton Kutcher Christopher Ashton Kutcher (; born February 7, 1978) is an American actor, producer, entrepreneur, and former model. He is the recipient of various accolades, including a People's Choice Award, and nominations for two Young Artist Awards, a ...

of the media company

A Plus (aplus.com) A Plus is a digital media company based in New York City. The company produces original written, social, and video content, with a focus on positive journalism. The company states that it "strive to deliver positive journalism to readers, with th ...

. A Plus ranks among the largest websites in the US, with 30 to 50 million monthly unique visitors, and six months after launch was the fastest growing website in comScore's Mobile Metrix database. Beard has been recognized on the Forbes "30 under 30" list which features the "brightest young entrepreneurs, breakout talents and change agents" and Business Insider's list of the "most inspiring and influential people in New York tech". Prior to A Plus, Beard co-founded Etacts and ArmorHub, both acquired by publicly traded companies.

Early life

Beard attended Duke University, where he studied computer science and graduated with distinction in economics in 2009. While finishing school he wrote a widely distributed iOS app, “Girlfriend Keeper”, which attracted attention from international media, including Good Morning America, the LA Times, Cosmopolitan Magazine, and local news and radio stations. The app asked for details about one's significant other and sent automated emails and text messages expressing affection, such as "it's only 67 days until your birthday, I might get you something green like your eyes".

Career

Etacts

In 2009, shortly after graduating college, Beard co-founded Etacts and was admitted to the

Y-Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Stripe ...

seed accelerator. Etacts was a relationship management app that provided a unified view of one's contacts and all emails, calls, and texts with them. It allowed setting reminders on one’s contacts to remember to stay in touch with them. It also provided a contextual widget within Gmail that automatically showed biographical details next to emails, such as the education and work history of your correspondents. The company raised $700,000 from prominent angel investors, including

Ron Conway Ronald Crawford Conway (born March 9, 1951) is an American venture capitalist and philanthropist. He has been described as one of Silicon Valley's " super angels". Early career Conway graduated from San Jose State University with a bachelor's d ...

and

. In 2010, Etacts was acquired by

Salesforce.com Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, a ...

, where Beard subsequently worked in engineering as a Senior Member of Technical Staff.

ArmorHub

In 2011, Beard co-founded Gridtech Inc which created ArmorHub.com. ArmorHub is an app that allows businesses to quickly scan their websites for application-level security

vulnerabilities Vulnerability refers to "the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally." A window of vulnerability (WOV) is a time frame within which defensive measures are diminished, com ...

such as SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting. ArmorHub was acquired by Spirent Communications, a publicly traded British company.

A Plus

In 2013, Beard moved to Los Angeles to co-found A Plus with

and Kendall Dabaghi. A Plus is a technology-focused media company that creates positive journalism for millennials and uses its own technology for content creation, optimization and distribution. After a soft launch in early 2014, A Plus grew to 50 million unique visitors per month and six months after launch was the fastest growing site in comScore’s Mobile Metrix database. The site raised $3.5m from investors in 2015 and expects $8 million in revenue in 2016. A Plus started in Kutcher’s living room and moved to New York City in 2014.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Beard, Evan Living people 1986 births American business executives