Jeffrey Davitz, Founder and CEO

Jeffrey’s background includes an array of responsibilities with start-ups including product management, core technical research and development, and marketing strategy. Prior to founding Solariat, Jeffrey was a Program Manager at SRI’s Artificial Intelligence Center where he founded and managed the Social Computing Group. While at SRI, Jeffrey was on the management team of the CALO project — the largest AI project in history involving research and system development efforts at over 22 universities. As part of that effort, Jeffrey’s Social Computing team developed the first social network based FAQ system. The team also deployed several conversational assistant tools, which are still in use across a range of private social networks in the US Army and Air Force.

Prior to SRI, Jeffrey was a founder and CEO of Critical Point Software, a natural language search engine, where he helped build some of the first test systems in telematics that supported natural language interfaces to on-board data services.

Jeffrey did his undergraduate work at the University of Chicago and has a PhD in Statistics from Columbia University.

Conor McGann, Founder and CTO

Conor is an experienced entrepreneur with over 20 years working in business and technology ranging from large-scale enterprise software to advanced technology R&D. Conor was a founder of Cunav Technologies, an enterprise software services company. Conor built and managed the company through 3 years of profitable growth. He was the Chief Architect for the Customer Management Product Group at i2 where he managed technical and product teams for the rapidly growing enterprise market. Conor was also at NASA where he pioneered the use of automated planning technology for controlling autonomous robotic explorers. In 2010, he founded Wizbots to teach kids creative problem solving and design through robotics.

Conor has a Bachelors in Mathematics and Engineering, and a PhD in Computer Science, from Trinity College Dublin (Ireland).

Scott Van Buskirk, COO

Scott offers over 20 years of experience working with early-stage companies. He has supported the process of strategy articulation and business plan development as well as implementing and managing rational business practices in finance, operations, HR, marketing, and corporate legal affairs. Scott completes Solariat’s management team as its COO. Prior to joining Solariat, Scott has consulted for numerous emerging enterprises and most recently served as CFO to Proximal Labs, Social Kinetics and Lipomics.

Scott is a graduate from UC Santa Barbara and holds an MBA from St. Mary’s College Executive program.

John Lindner, Chief Revenue Officer

John is a successful entrepreneur with extensive experience generating revenues at early stage companies. Most recently, John was Area VP NA Sales for IBM’s social media analytics solution, branded IBM Cognos Consumer Insight, which John and his sales team launched in January 2011. John came to IBM via their acquisition of Cognos after Cognos acquired Celequest, a venture-backed, real-time analytics company where he managed sales, presales and services. Before Celequest, John was VP of Sales at Omniva Policy Systems, an email policy management company acquired by Liquid Machines. Previously, John was VP of Worldwide Sales for the Commerce, Web Search and Enterprise Search divisions of Inktomi.


John has a Bachelor’s degree in Mass Communications/Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.