Management Team

Meeting Sciences’ management team brings to the company not just wide-ranging skills and expertise relevant to excelling at their particular roles and responsibilities, but also extensive depth and breadth of experience in successfully growing early-stage, fast-growth companies.

Robert Anastasi - CEO & PresidentMr. Anastasi has more than twenty years of senior management experience at technology-based companies, with an emphasis on bringing new companies and products to market.  He has been a senior executive with seven software companies – two of which provided SaaS solutions – and played key roles in six start-ups, including one which went public, two which were successfully sold with positive returns for investors, and one which still operates as a privately held company.  Mr. Anastasi is particularly skilled at balancing the detail-level management critical during the early stages of a company’s growth, while keeping an eye on the big picture, a finger on the pulse of the marketplace and the company as a whole executing to a focused strategic plan.

David Gustafson - Chief Technology Officer Mr. Gustafson has twenty-five years of experience across virtually every area of software development, including executive-level positions at a number of product development and professional services companies.  He is a subject matter expert on content and information management, and has a long history of developing leading-edge distributed technology solutions, including SaaS delivery models.  Mr. Gustafson's track record includes architecting numerous mission critical systems, as well as playing key roles in multiple early-stage companies: one went public and another sold for $33M.

Edmund Kelly - Acting CFOMr. Kelly has over twenty years of senior management experience in finance, operations and business development.  He began his career as a CPA and was a Senior Manager with Ernst & Young for eleven years.  Following several CFO positions, Mr. Kelly has spent the past fifteen years as a serial entrepreneur and successful COO and CEO.  He has built and sold multiple companies, including one he co-founded, grew to over $175 million and sold to Paul Allen's (co-founder of Microsoft) venture company.

Tiffany Rapplean - Director of LearningFor fifteen years, Ms. Rapplean has been producing world class instructional materials for learners of every type and skill set.  Her audience has encompassed a wide variety of cultural backgrounds and ranged from entry level employees to senior executives.  Her broad experience includes developing curriculum for effectively every modern delivery method… whether live instructors or virtual instructors, from traditional classroom to computer-based to web-based… even cutting-edge immersive training simulations within virtual environments.

Cliff Shaffran - Meeting-MavenMr. Shaffran is the creator of the core knowledge that is meeting-science.  In 1988, Mr. Shaffran founded the Quicksilver Group / Q3global, which focused on developing innovative change programs that helped global companies drive business growth.  Mr. Shaffran continues to pursue research and practice into the dynamics of how people communicate and teams interact, and is an internationally recognized thought leader, speaker and published author in the areas of optimizing group communications and running highly effective meetings.

Finlay Waugh - SVP, Sales:  Mr. Waugh has twenty years of experience in B2B sales and business development.  He has a proven track record of delivering bottom-line results within both large and early-stage companies.  At Dun & Bradstreet, he identified and managed a new business opportunity… growing revenues to $15 million in less than 3 years.  As vice president for a division of DoubleClick, he directed the sales and operations for the B2B side of the business, achieving 50% plus annual growth.  Most recently, he founded and ran an Internet-based marketing firm that successfully sold for 6x ROI.

Chris Durkin - MD, Asia-PacificMr. Durkin was a partner in the Quicksilver Group / Q3global and has played a significant role in the development of meeting-science.  He has spent the past twenty years working with executive teams around the world to raise creative thinking, develop and hone business strategies and implement change programs.  Working primarily with Fortune 1000 companies, he has designed and successfully run over a thousand meetings of every type and size across twenty countries.  He is highly sought after by companies around the world to help them run their most critical meetings.