BrightTALK executive team

Paul Heald
Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder

Paul Heald co-founded BrightTALK in 2002 to help organizations engage their customers through live, online events. As CEO, Heald has led BrightTALK to its current position as a leading provider of online events, with a rapidly growing community of business and industry professionals. Paul is based at BrightTALK’s U.S. headquarters in San Francisco, CA.

Before founding BrightTALK, Heald was the European managing director of Scient, a web technology development company. Prior to Scient, he ran Arthur D. Little’s e-business consulting group. Heald is an MBA graduate of Cranfield School of Management (U.K.).

Charlie Blackburn
Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder

Charlie Blackburn is a co-founder of BrightTALK. Since helping launch the business in 2002, he has been instrumental in the global adoption of BrightTALK’s unique approach to webcasting. He is responsible for operations which he manages from BrightTALK’s U.K. headquarters in London, England.

Prior to co-founding BrightTALK, he was vice president of European operations for Scient. Before joining Scient, he developed San Francisco-based Pyramid Imaging’s Investment Banking practice. He began his career with Accenture. Blackburn earned a first class honors degree in Mechanical Engineering at Manchester University (U.K.).

Richard Heald
Executive Vice President, Sales

Richard Heald joined BrightTALK in 2002 as executive vice president of sales where he is not only responsible for growing the company’s global customer base but also for ensuring that every client engagement is successful. He led the company’s sales effort from its market entry to its current rapid growth phase. Heald heads BrightTALK’s sales and account management teams, which are based in San Francisco, New York and London.

Prior to joining BrightTALK, Heald was an associate director at Schroder Investment Management. He previously held similar roles at HSBC Bank and Aviva Insurance. Richard has a bachelor’s degree in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from Leeds University (U.K.).

Jan McDaniel
Chief Marketing Officer

Jan McDaniel joined BrightTALK in 2008 to oversee marketing and to build the BrightTALK brand. During her career in marketing, she has worked for and advised some of the largest business-to-business technology companies, including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Oracle, and Apple.

McDaniel spent 16 years at Hewlett-Packard, where she was responsible for launching and sustaining momentum for major products and was part of the HP/Compaq merger team. In 2005, she joined Intel, where she led a worldwide team that defined and managed the company’s enterprise marketing and brand strategy. McDaniel has a bachelor’s of science degree from the University of California, Davis.

Dorian Logan
Chief Technology Officer

Dorian Logan has been the chief architect of BrightTALK’s technology since joining the company in 2004. Logan has more than 15 years experience developing enterprise applications. He specializes in new media, Internet technologies and open source projects.

Logan worked for IBM Global Services in the Interactive Media Center for several years, before joining Scient, where he met the founders of BrightTALK. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Systems from Nottingham Trent University (U.K.).

Alexandra Mackaness
Finance Director

Alexandra Mackaness joined BrightTALK in 2002, becoming finance director in 2004. She came to BrightTALK after 18 years of varied experience in private equity and corporate finance.

Mackaness joined Bankers Trust Company in 1986. She then spent 4 years as Investment Director with HSBC Private Equity in London before moving to Arthur D. Little to work on privatization and corporate finance assignments in Venezuela, Pakistan, South Africa, Oman, South Korea, and Central Europe, and became Head of Corporate Finance at Arthur D. Little. She earned a first class honors degree in Economics at University College London (U.K.).