Rob Ciampa came up through the Italian restaurant and wine business in Boston’s historic North End to become a tech entrepreneur, provocative speaker, bestselling book author, and a successful operations, sales, marketing, product, and services executive. He manages Business Catalytics, an advisory and business intelligence company that analyzes and benchmarks the competitive competence of organizations and markets.
Rob is a Techstars alumnus. Most recently, Rob led WePlayed, a company he co-founded and ran, through this prestigious technology accelerator. At WePlayed, Rob helped build and bring to market an intelligent college sports media platform that used machine-learning, computer vision, and crowdsourcing to activate and monetize content for schools and sponsors.
Before that, Rob spent five years as VP of Sales and CMO of Pixability, a company he helped transform from a fledgling startup of nine people to a proud member of the prestigious Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Privately-Held Companies in America. Under his watch, Pixability became the world’s top advertising technology platform for YouTube and garnered two prestigious Cannes Lions nominations for the effective use of data in advertising. While there, Rob worked with brands, agencies, media companies, celebrities, and entertainment artists on media strategy, marketing, advertising, and monetization. He is the lead author of YouTube Channels for Dummies, Amazon’s top-rated book on video strategy, execution, and analytics, with its new, 2nd Edition coming this fall. Upon Rob’s exit to start Business Catalytics, The Boston Business Journal announced Pixability as Massachusetts’ fastest growing, privately held company.
Rob has a history of business and digital transformation, which includes turning around a struggling software company, selling it to a Fortune 500 company, and then growing product revenue from $30 million to over $100 million in 12 months. Additionally, he founded an international consulting and services company that went from zero to $27 million in revenue in 18 months. Rob also served as both engineering and marketing lead for an innovative product company that revolutionized networking and delivered $250 million in revenue.
Rob is a well-known speaker who has presented multiple times at SXSW, Brand Innovators, Digital Hollywood, WWD Digital, and many other high-profile business innovation venues. He frequently presents on digital strategy, sales, marketing, business operations, and entrepreneurship and also works with graduate and undergraduate students from numerous colleges and universities including Babson, Bentley, Boston University, MIT, Northeastern, Tufts, and The University of Massachusetts. Rob is also the founder of The Electric Project, a non-profit that helps talented people, including students, mothers, veterans, and displaced workers, acquire the skills necessary for the innovation economy.
He lives in the Boston-area with his entrepreneurial wife, Laura, who runs an innovative kitchen consultancy and curation business, Kitchd. They frequently collaborate with their two grown sons who chose film and music careers instead of software engineering. Rob has degrees in computer science, electrical engineering, and business management; holds patents in data transmission, analytics, and visualization; and thinks crafting garage vermouth is far more difficult than programming in Python.