Christopher Hiester

Chris Hiester has been pushing the limits of technology to improve the way people live, learn, and work for over 30 years.

In 1990, with funding from Apple and IBM, Chris led software development at Project Vanguard, pioneering the use of video and hypertext to teach languages at the University of Pennsylvania and nationwide. Chris brought the innovations of these digital curricula to a worldwide audience through the magic of the new NSCA Mosaic web browser. A year later, Penn promoted Chris to become the first-ever webmaster at Penn, where he led the first major design of University's online brand.

Transitioning to the world of business, Chris led development efforts to optimize pharmaceutical sales teams' performance for clients such as Pfizer, Schering- Plough, and AstraZeneca through web-based, real-time data analysis. In 1999, Chris joined The Vanguard Group as its first-ever Site Architect. He spearheaded a redesign of Vanguard's web site, creating a design system shared across business divisions to present a cohesive and consistent customer experience for Vanguard's (then) 12 million investors.

In 2000, Chris joined Adobe (then Allaire, pre-acquisition) as Principal Engineer. Chris provided expert vendor consulting services to clients worldwide, including AT&T, NASCAR, Victoria's Secret, Henkel (Germany), British Telecom, and Correios (Brazil), among many others.

In 2006, Chris joined Yahoo! as UI Developer of the official FIFA World Cup web site. He built all sponsored areas of the site including the McDonalds World Cup Fantasy game (875,000 registered users). The site recorded 4.2 billion page views during the competition, served 125 million video streams, and broke the record (at the time) for largest number of simultaneous requests ever served by any web host, with zero outages and no downtime.

In the last decade, Chris shifted his focus to the enterprise. He has lent his expertise to a variety of successful projects including Elsevier's "Clinical Key" (medical search engine known as "Google for doctors"), the US Treasury Department's "OTCNet" (US Government's point-of-sale system), and MOTO, an internal big data analytics system used by Comcast to reduce its direct mail costs by 20% while expanding its subscriber base.

Most recently, Chris led UI development on two IoT startups. Leading a team of five developers, Chris launched Viridity Energy's VPower, a reactive microservices platform that optimizes electric utility purchasing and market participation for large electricity-consuming enterprises. From 2017-2019, Chris led UI development at Canary Compliance, a network of smart sensors connected to automatic tank gauges in underground storage tanks at thousands of gas stations across the country. The Canary dashboard allows station owners and managers remotely monitor alarms and fuel levels in real time, leading to fewer spills, improved regulatory compliance, and more profitable operations.

Chris is a Certified Scrum Master and did his Scrum training with Jeff Sutherland, co- inventor of Scrum and co-author of The Agile Manifesto.

Chris lives in Philadelphia, PA with his wife and three children. Outside of work, he enjoys reading, cooking, movies, music, pickup basketball and ultimate frisbee. He has served as a youth baseball and basketball coach and referee for 12 years.