The Team

John Scrofano co-founded Nearlyweds with Porter Bayne and Eric Malone. They worked together at a previous start-up that John helped co-found, build to the largest off deck ring tone provider in the US at the time, scale revenues to 8 digits in less than 4 years, and sell to a prominent, well respected venture capital firm.

John loves building scalable businesses that are fanatically customer focused, teams that are exceptionally creative and efficient, and sentences with excessive use of superlatives. John has the most wonderful wife ever (no excessive superlative use here) and is excited to be a new dad. He bikes to work, loves good coffee, and is equally happy in front of a spreadsheet, customer, or an audience.

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Although happily unmarried, Iris has a not-so-secret nerdism for marriage and relationships, and is more than slightly obsessed with offbeat weddings. As a freelance unicorn, she's never tied down for long, but when caught she'll spend her time on branding, design and front end development. While her horn can make any website sparkle, it also channels the hard science needed for good UI and UX, so if you ask her to "hit it with the pretty stick", she may become offended, and vanish into thin air.

When she's not altering the future of the internet, Iris tends to be blogging about radical politics, rocking out to the latest in post-hardcore, or composing songs for her future music career.

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Chris DeVore has been an investor, operator and executive at both public and private companies. Prior to Founders Co-op, Chris co-founded Judy's Book and served as the company's COO. Previously Chris was a Vice President at Sapient Corporation (NASDAQ: SAPE), where he built and led the company's strategy consulting practice and was also a core member of the M&A and corporate venturing teams. Chris arrived at Sapient via the 1999 acquisition of Adjacency, an e-Commerce consultancy he and his partners bootstrapped into a profitable, 50-person, $15MM firm serving clients like Apple, Nordstrom, Virgin, Land Rover and Steelcase. Prior to Adjacency, Chris served as Patagonia's Director of eCommerce, building that outdoor retailer's first online retail presence, and also led and managed six of the company's product lines. Pre-Internet, Chris held senior product management and strategic planning roles at McCaw Cellular (acquired by AT&T) and at AT&T (NYSE: T).

Chris's early-stage investments include: Appature, AppStoreHQ, Colligent, Cooler Planet, Deal Co-op, Estately, Frugal Mechanic, Highlighter, Nearlyweds!, Massively Fun, PHP Fog, Sparkbuy and Urban Airship. Chris received his BA in American Studies from Yale in 1990 and attended the MBA program at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Chris is a Seattle native and lives in Wallingford with his wife, Emily, and two children.

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Before moving back to NYC in June 2010, Porter launched two angel-funded startups in Seattle - more or less at the same time. Nearlyweds, which he sits on the board of, acquired OneWed.com in Fall 2010 and is poised to bring much needed innovation to the intersection of online bridal technology, media, and vendor recommendations. He also launched Ameritocracy in Spring 2008, which sought to address many similar problems and opportunities with online engagement as ReadrBoard does. Ameritocracy closed in August 2010, and from the lessons learned there, ReadrBoard was born.

His earlier career includes designing & building online software for Verizon Wireless, TV Guide, Zagat, aura readers, and defense contractors.

At a young age Eric broke computers, ingested his parent's DOS manual and copied BASIC from library books. He graduated from UW with a degree in Computing and Software Systems and has been at the ground level of startups since. Eric enjoys all the great DIY wedding ideas and learning about fashion while mispronouncing words like 'tafetta'.

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Azure is a self-proclaimed fashion fanatic and serves as Onewed's editorial director. She still loves writing, going to bridal fashion shows, and working every day on asking the big and small questions about weddings to inspire brides. She has a particular affinity for coconut water, pretzel rolls and buttery Chardonnay.

Faye Ehrich recently joined onewed as an account manager. She lived abroad for three years in Egypt, where she witnessed many different types of weddings and love, and realized just about everyone loves love. Her background is with communications and events.

Although not married herself, Faye's favorite things about weddings are families coming together, dance floor antics, that one little kid who always steals the show, and champagne. Her least favorite thing about weddings is when the song "Shout" is played, but appreciates the silly dance moves it inspires in other people.

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Even after being married for several years, Brandi loved weddings so much that she worked in wedding photography, planning, and dabbled in floral before joining Onewed. She now gets her fix by chatting it up with brides in the forum and working with the other moderators to keep it fun and fresh.

Brandi loves to tell brides to go ahead and rock that pink hair and matching pink shoes and to remind them that no one will remember a bridesmaid having the wrong shoes, but they will remember if you throw a fit about it.

Beth is an EVP at NBCUniversal and the General Manager of Daily Candy, known for its quirky but trendsetting voice and eclectic taste, DailyCandy has developed a loyal and influential audience. DailyCandy publishes 3.3M email subscriptions via 28 editions (both national and city-specific in scope). Swirl, Online Sample Sales by DailyCandy launched in 2009.

Prior to joining DailyCandy, Beth was Content Director of Hearst Digital Media, where she was part of the digital-business launch team; she directed editorial strategy and operations for 14 websites, including Cosmopolitan.com, Seventeen.com, Marie Claire.com, and Redbookmag.com.

Prior to joining Hearst, Beth spent a total of five years at The Walt Disney Company, and eleven years at Time Inc., where she held a series of increasingly-responsible positions in consumer marketing, finance, sales development and digital media.