Our Team
Growth Accelerators
Gary Davis
At Velocity Z, Gary is a partner and leads the marketing services practice where he primarily provides Agile marketing services to our partner companies. Prior to joining Velocity Z, Gary spent over 10 years at Intel Corporation and McAfee where he served as vice president of marketing. During his tenure he led global teams that created high impact strategies and programs that regularly delivered double digit growth and dramatically grew the customer base. His success is attributed to spearheading several initiatives including the introduction of Agile marketing to grow market share; the launch of fifteen products all of which contributed to the growth of the company; the creation of a thought leadership platform that regularly resulted in a dominate share of voice; and, the overhaul of the messaging platform that drove a significant increase in customer engagement.
Before joining Intel and McAfee, Gary held executive leadership positions at companies ranging in size from greenfield startups to mid-market including being CMO of CommerceQuest which was acquired by Metastorm.
Paul Slaats
Paul Slaats is a partner who provides business planning along with funding advice and services for Velocity Z partner companies. He is also a partner at Milestone Partners bringing over 30 years of successful technology-related business experience and 23 years in private equity and venture investing. He joined Milestone in 2017 and has served as a board director and as a senior executive resource for several technology companies in their portfolio.
Until 2018, Paul served as a board executive and co-founder of Thuzi LLC, a cloud-based software platform for event owners, consumer brands, venues and cities, focused on solutions that integrate live and local events, social media, mobile applications, web-based systems and ecommerce. He also concurrently served as Chief Executive Officer of ListenLogic, a Philadelphia and San Jose-based provider of streaming data analytics and business intelligence technology services to dozens of major consumer brands.
From 1996 through 2010, Paul served as Managing Director at Internet Capital Group (now Actua, NASD: ACTA) joining as its third employee. While at ICG, he led investments in twelve platform technology companies and led or participated in over 20 additional merger, acquisition, and investment transactions. His investment and operations expertise includes enterprise and Internet software, SaaS, online marketing technologies, data analytics and cloud computing infrastructure.
Scott Blackburn
Scott's bio and photo...
Craig Blackburn
At Velocity Z, Craig leads our engineering services where he is responsible for delivering world-class products and technical solutions for our partner companies. Prior to joining Velocity Z, Craig spent over 10 years at Thuzi where he served as vice president of development and products. During his tenure he led development efforts that built web platforms and mobile applications used by companies worldwide to deliver memorable experiential marketing experiences to consumers. Craig's early adoption of the Agile methodology for software development allowed him to be successful in delivering complex applications in short time frames.
Before joining Thuzi, Craig was a co-founder at TeamZoneSports a software company specializing in creating sports platforms for well known brands including Under Armour and IMG.