Founders
Andrés Espiñeira, President
After fifteen years in Silicon Valley, Andrés moved to Colorado to focus on his family and his personal aspirations. He sailed across the Atlantic Ocean with his father, fulfilling a lifelong dream, and is now working on his next goal -- Pixorial.
Andrés is an entrepreneur with a strong background in product strategy, marketing, and software development. He was Vice President of Marketing of Open Grid, Inc., a company delivering wireless internet solutions to Fortune 100 companies. Andrés built the team from one to over twenty marketing and product design professionals. He also helped to secure a $19M round of financing.
Prior to OpenGrid, Andrés spent four years in management at Netscape Communications, playing a leading role in shaping Netscape's initial electronic commerce product strategy. This strategy resulted in the first widely used end-to-end systems deployed by major websites for publishing, communications and electronic transactions. After launching these systems, Andrés built partnerships with strategic content providers and created marketing programs to support their participation in Netscape’s portal. After Netscape offered its browser source code free to the public, Andrés was fully responsible for creating and managing a team of business developers and marketing managers who proliferated the Netscape browser worldwide through programs and partnerships with major ISPs, OEMs, and content providers.
Prior to Netscape, Andrés worked at Oracle Corporation in various engineering roles, among them managing the engineering team responsible for the rollout of Oracle 7 on UNIX platforms.
Andrés has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a Master in Management from the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University. He interviews applicants for Kellogg, coaches soccer and loves the outdoors. Andrés is also very passionate about photography, and enjoys creating and editing video productions for his children's school.
Gina Miccio, Vice President of Sales and Operations
Gina brings to Pixorial a strong background in consulting and management.
In the early stages of her career, at Oracle Corporation, Gina managed a technical support group responsible for assisting customers in application design. After Oracle, Gina spent two years overseas teaching elementary school. Upon returning to the United States, Gina was able to merge her technical and educational interests when she began work at Lightspan, Inc., a $49 million provider of education software. At Lightspan, she managed a 20 person consulting team within a 25 state territory. She developed process and program improvement strategies for over 1,000 urban, suburban and rural school districts across the country. In addition to her consulting and management responsibilities, Gina worked with a team of 15 sales directors to generate new and additional revenue within the western half of the United States. Committed to whole system improvement, Gina also initiated and collaborated in the design of two internal online applications which systemically changed Lightspan’s paper-based tracking of implementations to online, relational-database tracking and warehousing.
For the past several years, Gina has run her own successful educational consulting practice, where she has specialized in redesigning curriculum to increase learning for minority and low-income students in large, urban school districts.
Gina graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations, and earned a Master of Education from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was a Dean’s Fellow. She has lived in Italy, France and Morocco and is conversant in Italian and French. In her spare time, she enjoys Pilates workouts, the piano and travel with her husband and two small children. She is often found behind the lens of a camcorder, capturing her children's experiences, both big and small, on video.