Management Team
Our management team is composed of industry veterans, seasoned technologists and direct marketing experts.
- » Daniel Yates - CEO, Founder
- » Alex Laskey - President, Founder
- » Jeremy Kirsch - VP Client Solutions
- » Marc Solomon - VP of Product Management
- » Jeff Kolesky - Chief Software Architect
- » Kyle Yost - Director, Systems Development
- » Dr. Robert Cialdini - Chief Scientist
Daniel Yates, CEO, Founder
As CEO, Yates is responsible for the vision, strategy and leadership of Positive Energy. Prior to founding Positive Energy, Yates was founder and CEO of Edusoft, the leading educational software company providing assessment platforms to US public school districts. He led the company from inception to national success and recognized leadership in the market. Yates is also credited with the design of Edusoft’s revolutionary plain-paper scanning solution that replaced the Scantron machine and consequently transformed the educational testing market.
Yates sold the 150-person, $20M revenue company to Boston-based publishing company Houghton Mifflin in 2004.
After his departure from Houghton Mifflin, Yates embarked on a year-long adventure with his wife, as they drove their car from the Arctic Sea in Alaska half-way around the globe to Ushuaia, Argentina at the southern tip of South America. It was through this voyage that he was made witness to the shocking pervasiveness of environmental degradation, and consequently dedicated himself to working to help sustain what remains of our beautiful natural world.
Daniel Yates received his B.A. in Computer Science, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Harvard University.
Alex Laskey, President, Founder
As President and Founder, Laskey applies his expertise in marketing and policy to spread the word about Positive Energy nationwide. Most recently he worked on several statewide ballot measures on environmental issues with the public opinion research and political strategy firm of Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, and Associates (FMMA). While at FMMA, Laskey provided strategic consulting for The Nature Conservancy, The Trust for Public Land, and The League of Conservation Voters. Previously, Laskey managed a high profile campaign for the California State Assembly and ran other local and state campaigns.
Laskey has worked for the White House and on two presidential campaigns.
Before turning to politics and policy, Laskey produced the award-winning feature film, Assisted Living, and worked as the director of new business and strategy for The Romann Group, a New York-based advertising agency where he ran strategic planning for consumer-facing clients including Citibank, Echostar - Dish Network, Priceline, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T.
Alex Laskey received his B.A. in History of Science from Harvard University where he received a Ford Foundation Grant for his research on the environmental history of the American West.
Jeremy Kirsch - VP Client Solutions
Kirsch has been leading high-performance teams, working with customers and partners, and building businesses for over 12 years. Prior to joining Positive Energy Kirsch was an executive in the Viisage Secure Credentialing business at L-1 Identity Solutions (NYSE:ID). At Viisage Kirsch held a series of positions including VP Sales and Business Development and VP Marketing and Strategy. Kirsch led a customer-facing team which included direct sales, business development, sales support, marketing, and strategy. Kirsch's team was critical in the division's rapid growth from $67 million to more than $100 million in annual revenue through expanded direct sales and key distribution partners such as Motorola. Major customers included over 50 federal, state, and local government agencies.
Prior to L-1, Kirsch held operational roles at Art Technology Group (NASD:ARTG) and was a founding member of the start-up InvestorTree.com. In both companies, Kirsch helped bring new products and services to market.
Earlier in his career, Kirsch was a Special Operations Officer in the U.S. Navy from 1996-2002. He served as a member of elite Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit Two. He made two overseas deployments to Europe and the Middle East with the USS WASP and the USS GUAM, during which he served as Officer of the Deck during combat operations. Kirsch also served as Electrical Officer onboard the WASP overseeing the systems generating and distributing the power to this 'floating city' of 2,500 people. He completed his Naval service achieving the rank of Lieutenant.
Jeremy Kirsch received his B.A. in Economics from Stanford University and his M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Marc Solomon, VP of Product Management
Solomon brings extensive direct marketing experience from Capital One where he held various leadership roles in consumer marketing and product development. Most recently he was VP of Enterprise Marketing Strategy where he focused on building deeper customer relationships through cross-sell and Internet marketing strategies. Prior to this role, Solomon was VP of Upmarket Card Marketing Strategy and was responsible for direct marketing programs to acquire new customers. He managed a $250MM+ marketing budget and a team of 45 that developed targeted marketing campaigns.
Earlier in his career at Capital One Solomon led the development of the company’s miles and cash rewards credit card loyalty programs. Over a 4 year period, he drove the initial product pilots and built the programs into a major component of Capital One’s overall Card acquisition and loyalty strategy.
Prior to Capital One and business school, Solomon was an associate at Booz-Allen & Hamilton in the Energy and Chemicals Group where he consulted to major electric utilities. He specialized in building analytic models to forecast regional energy prices and financial impacts to shareholders and ratepayers.
Marc Solomon received his B.S.E. in Operations Research, magna cum laude, from Princeton University and his M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Jeff Kolesky, Chief Software Architect
Kolesky has been building software products professionally for eight years. His career has spanned from building web applications for start-ups during the dot-com boom to architecting a massive educational testing platform. This experience has led to his outlook on engineering that anything can be built, and it is only a matter of time and energy.
Prior to joining Positive Energy, Kolesky worked at Fanlib, serving as the lead engineer behind Fanlib’s foundational search technology. As the Director of Engineering at Stylehive, Kolesky led a team of four engineers through the initial launch and scale-out of the product, managing the project along with contributing to the development process.
Before Stylehive, Kolesky worked with Yates and served as the chief architect at Edusoft where he helped build a massive testing platform for K-12 school districts. Kolesky oversaw the product as it scaled from 0 to 3mm students’ worth of data, all regularly imported through a custom application he designed and built.
Kolesky started his career at Scient where he designed and developed large scale transaction-based web sites to facilitate eBusiness for dot-com startups and enterprise spin-offs including Boots/Digital Wellbeing, Fasturn, and Carstation among others. While at Scient he gained practical knowledge of three-tier architecture (web server/application server/database server).
Jeff Kolesky graduated magna cum laude with distinction from Duke University with a double B.S.E in electrical engineering and computer science.
Kyle Yost, Director, Systems Development
Yost’s expertise is in data warehousing, business intelligence, and application development. Prior to joining Positive Energy, he worked at MicroStrategy where he was an architect responsible for the design and development of MicroStrategy’s business intelligence enterprise software, a suite of products that is currently responsible for over $150 million in annual sales. In addition to designing industry-leading business intelligence software, Yost has been hired as an expert consultant by firms such as Catalina Marketing and US Postal Service to assist in the design and development of very large-scale data warehousing and business intelligence projects utilizing over forty terabytes of data and hundreds of end-users.
When not designing large-scale data warehouses and business intelligence solutions, Yost is an avid athlete, having completed multiple Ironman triathlons and cycled the Tour de France and across Africa.
Kyle Yost received Bachelor of Arts degrees in Computer Science and Chemistry, summa cum laude from Amherst College.
Dr. Robert Cialdini, Chief Scientist
Professor Cialdini has taken a sabbatical from his teaching responsibilities and will be working with Positive Energy extensively to define, test and optimize messaging to increase conservation and participation in offset programs.
Extensive scholarly training in the psychology of influence, together with over 30 years of research into the subject, has earned Dr. Cialdini an international reputation as an expert in the fields of persuasion, compliance, and negotiation. Dr. Cialdini has spent much of the last decade studying conservation and efficiency.
His books including, Influence: Science and Practice, are the results of years of study into the reasons that people comply with requests in business settings. Worldwide, Influence has sold over a million copies. Influence has been published in twenty languages and consistently ranks within the top one half of one percent of books sold on Amazon.com.
In the field of influence and persuasion, Dr. Cialdini is the most cited social psychologist in the world today.
Robert Cialdini received his Ph.D from the University of North Carolina and his post doctoral training from Columbia University. He has held Visiting Scholar Appointments at Ohio State University, the University of California, the Annenberg School of Communications, and the Graduate School of Business of Stanford University. Currently, Dr. Cialdini holds dual appointments at Arizona State University. He is a W.P. Carey Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Regents Professor of Psychology, where he has also been named Distinguished Graduate Research Professor.