Collexpo

Located in Richmond, VA, Collexpo is a company focused on feeding the passion of collectors — to interact with one another, learn about their hobby and show off their collections.

The company has built a proprietary software platform that powers multiple collector communities around the Collexpo.com hub. The resulting websites combine social networking and collectible research tools woven together in a unique experience tailored for collectors. Collexpo's current deployments target collectors in the following hobbies: baseball cards, cars, coins, comic books and stamps. Future sites include wine, coins, and stamps, among others.

Carrington Williams founded the company in January 2008. He is a former investment analyst who also spent three years at AOL after earning an MBA from the Darden School of Business Administration at UVa. See below for his full bio.

Management Bios

Chamath Palihapitiya, Chairman

Chamath Palihapitiya serves as Chairman and advisor for Collexpo. In his day job, he is Vice President of Product Marketing at Facebook and is responsible for overseeing new monetization and advertising products, all business aspects of the Facebook Platform, fbFund (Facebook's venture capital fund), customer operations, corporate communications, marketing, privacy and public policy. Chamath joined Facebook from The Mayfield Fund, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley where he was focused on Consumer Internet, advertising and media investments. Prior to Mayfield, Chamath spent five years with AOL, most recently as the Vice President and General Manager of instant messaging products, including AIM and ICQ, with complete responsibility and oversight of two of the biggest and most popular brands on the Internet. Chamath began his career as a derivatives trader before leaving finance to work for Internet music pioneers Spinner.com and Winamp. Chamath graduated first class honors in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo.

Carrington Williams, Founder

Carrington Williams is the founder of Collexpo. He has been an early employee at two startups, including UVentures.com (employee #1) and Beaufort Advisors (employee #7). After graduating from Washington & Lee University in 1996, he served as an equity analyst following the software and pharmaceutical industries for three years at Brown Brothers Harriman in New York. While at Brown Brothers, Carrington also earned the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation. At UVentures, he managed construction of the company's website, wrote the business plan and helped raise almost $2 million in capital. Thereafter, Carrington earned an MBA from the Darden School of Graduate Business at the University of Virginia and interned in investment banking at J.P Morgan in New York. After graduate school, he spent three years at AOL, where he wrote software requirements for digital media applications, program managed software development projects and served as manager of the $50 million digital music subscription product, MusicNet@AOL.com. For the year before founding Collexpo, he worked in business development for Beaufort Advisors, a consulting firm founded by Al Ritter, the former CFO of Landmark Communications.

Sean Boice, Technology Architect

Sean leads all technical efforts at Collexpo, launching the prototype software and beyond. He assists with requirements definition, negotiating license agreements with software vendors and has designed the overall Collexpo software system. He is an accomplished senior systems engineer and architect with over twelve years experience creating enterprise, consumer, and web based software, leveraging the latest tools and technologies.

Sean has been involved with 5 technology startups. These startups ranged from a hosted eCommerce provider (Demandware), financial services provider (Providus), Content-Delivery provider (Mirror-Image Internet), and a very large web portal (MyWay, a portfolio company of CMGi). Sean spent the last two years consulting on data protection schemes focused on HIPAA compliance as well as payment processing for the medical industry. Prior to that experience, Sean worked two years at Demandware where he was a Senior Systems Engineer. While at Demandware Sean architected and developed a web based management system capable of managing a large grid-network.

While at MyWay, Sean worked as a Senior Systems Engineer designing systems tools which assisted the IT department in maintaining My Way's architecture. During Sean's tenure with MyWay he was also engaged in a project to offer MyWay's product offering to South Africa's largest print publisher. During this project Sean spent six weeks on-site in Capetown, South Africa performing final integration tasks.