Frank Addante

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Frank Addante in the Silicon Valley Business Journal

1 Life and Work
2 References
3 External Links

[edit] Life and Work

Frank Addante (born 1976) is a serial entrepreneur, early Internet pioneer and well-known blogger. Addante has a successful entrepreneurial track record, having started 5 companies, resulting in one IPO and two acquisitions.

[edit] Entrepreneurial Career

Addante served as the Founding CEO of StrongMail Systems, the leading email and digital messaging infrastructure provider for thousands of companies worldwide, including Fox Sports/MSN, Ticketmaster, Williams Sonoma, FTD, Real Networks, Netflix, AAA and Stanford University.

StrongMail Systems was incubated by Addante and Associates, LLC, a technology incubator company created by Addante in 2001 during the dot-com fallout, a time when many were reluctant to start new companies. Addante incubated and then lead StrongMail from inception, to an initial cash-flow positive business, to becoming the market leader in less than 4 years, raising over $20 million in venture capital from top-tier investors including Sequoia Capital (investors behind Google, Yahoo, Oracle, Cisco and Apple).

Addante was formerly Chief Technology Officer and technology Founder of L90, Inc., a publicly-held Internet advertising company. Addante was actively involved in sales, marketing and corporate development efforts leading to a $112 million IPO led by SG Cowen. Addante invented adMonitor™, one of the Internet's top Internet advertising applications for the Global 2000. adMonitor delivered over 8 billion ad transactions per month for over 3,000 customers, reached 65% of the worldwide Internet population and produced over $75M in revenues. adMonitor was acquired by DoubleClick™ in October, 2001.

Shortly after L90’s IPO, Addante left the company and was the Founding CEO of Zondigo, a wireless and voice software company partnered with Intel. Addante successfully raised a second round of financing for Zondigo in 2001 and shortly thereafter, he returned the money to the company's investors, realizing that the wireless market opportunity was quickly declining at the time. Zondigo was later acquired by Voxicom. As an early pioneer of the Internet, Addante developed Starting Point, a search engine portal that became the 7th most popular Internet site from 1995-1997 and was acquired by CMGI/YesMail.com.

In addition to starting his own companies, Addante helped Ticketmaster gain entry into the $10 Billion ticketing resale market by leading the creation and development of a very high profile ticketing auction platform called TicketExchange. TicketExchange now services millions of consumers at Ticketmaster.com.

Addante received his education in electrical and computer engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology and serves on various boards of innovative technology and marketing companies including StrongMail Systems, mobileStorm, AnswerU, Neovision, Webtigo, Flukiest.com and Whizler.com.

A Chicago native, Frank lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Rita, and spends his free time mentoring young entrepreneurs, surfing, practicing martial arts and running.

[edit] Companies

Starting Point Directory - Internet search engine and directory
ReaXions - Web development & marketing technology company
L90, Inc. - Publicly-held Internet advertising company (LNTY)
Zondigo, Inc. - Wireless and voice application software company
StrongMail Systems, Inc. - Email and digital messaging infrastructure software company

[edit] Awards & Media

Addante was an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist, was nominated for Inc. Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year award and has been quoted in publications such as Forbes, MSNBC, RedHerring, InformationWeek and the Los Angeles and Silicon Valley Business Journals.