You Love Salesforce, but…
There are great candidates buried in it you can’t find. Or, student groups you can’t identify. Or, maybe, you just have way too many records. Whatever the search problem, Kona develops the solution.
"When you hear advisors saying they're hearing angels singing, you know you're on the right track."
Katherine Gomez, Fordham University
Management Team
Meet our ragtag group of internationally famous creative geniuses.
Chief Executive Officer
Andrew McKay
Andrew is the co-founder of KonaSearch. He has been a principal contributor to the enterprise search market for 19 years as co-founder at Attivio (ServiceNow, Lucidworks) and VP Sales & Marketing at FAST (Microsoft). He acquired his SaaS experience as an executive at GetConnected (Allconnect) and VCI (Cisco), analytics experience as CTO at Praedictus, and database, BI, and ETL experience as principal architect and engineer at Hummingbird (OpenText) and Sybase (SAP).
Chief Operating Officer
Mike Sanders
Mike is a seasoned operations, go-to-market, and data leader, whose experience includes more than 18 years of designing and building solutions on the Salesforce platform. Previously, Mike built and led the Sales Operations and Analytics organization for the Rosette business unit of BasisTech, and later led the GTM operations integration with Babel Street. While at Rosette, he served on the corporate development and deal team that achieved a successful exit to Babel Street, sponsored by Veritas Capital. Having served in a variety of leadership and consulting roles, Mike has worked with dozens of startups and enterprises, such as Verizon Enterprise Services, HP Enterprise, eSentire, Capsule, and Great Jones.
Chief Technology Officer
Dan Meehl
Dan has almost 20 years of experience as a software engineer, with more than 15 years focused in the search and big data space. He has been a driving force within KonaSearch for the past decade, and personal contributions to the KonaSearch software platform have been substantial. Dan’s experience includes leading numerous enterprise search and big data implementations for tier 1 banks, major online retailers, and government entities. His technical specialties include enterprise application UX design, LLM implementation, large-scale parser optimization, and complex data pipelines. Previously, Dan served as Principal Software Engineer at TruMedia and Ramp, and acquired his Computer Science degree from Northeastern University.
Chief Financial Officer
Natty Hoffman
Natty Hoffman has led finance and operations for venture backed technology companies. She was most recently the COO/CFO of Prattle Analytics, a FinTech startup automating investment research. Previously, she worked at IBM as client manager of global IT operations for an international custodial bank, and as a software consultant for financial services companies. Natty holds an MBA from the Rotman School of Management – University of Toronto, and undergraduate degrees in finance and journalism from the University of Massachusetts. Prior to college, Natty served in the Israeli military as a boot camp commander.
Vice President of Global Sales
Larissa Duzhansky
Larissa Duzhansky is a seasoned sales and alliances executive who is the VP of Sales for KonaSearch responsible for the business globally. Previously, Larissa worked at Camio, an AI powered video search technology, where she built the sales organization as their first VP of Sales. She also worked at Sinequa, an enterprise search company, where she was the Director of North American Channel Sales. She has also worked at Humanyze, Fuze, VMware, and McKinsey & Company. Larissa has a Master’s degree in International Economics and Finance from Brandeis and Management Certification from Harvard Business School.
Head of Content
Alex Detmering
Alex is a content marketer with eight years of experience in writing and content strategy. He’s helped brands tell stories that drive 700%+ increases in qualified traffic, get millions in venture funding, and earn placements in top-tier publications. And he’s worked with companies like Axon, HTC VIVE, Tapjoy, and Liftoff.
Japan Operations
Junichi Hasegawa
Jun manages KonaSearch Japan. Jun has varied and deep professional experience in a 30+ year high-tech career. His recent project was a FinTech startup to promote financial inclusion in growth countries, including Indonesia. Previously, he launched a successful Amazon Japan in the early days of ecommerce, developed and implemented ERP systems at PeopleSoft (Oracle), deployed PowerBuilder (Sybase, SAP) for accelerating client/server computing in Japan. Jun received MS in management from MIT Sloan School. He teaches Platform Strategy at Hosei Business School of Innovation Management as a Visiting Professor.