Meet our people.
If you're an Emma customer, it's very likely you've gotten to know one or more of the people pictured here. Perhaps you've met several of them. Perhaps you know one person quite well but have only spoken briefly with two others. Here's your chance to put a face with a name, or two names with two faces, and so on and so forth.
Jimmy Thorn
Jimmy is a graphic designer with Emma. A graduate of Grace College in Winona Lake, Indiana, Jimmy actually started school at the tender age of four. He would eventually be named a McDonald’s All American - not as an elite high school basketball player, but rather as a dude who can make Big Macs really, really fast. Jimmy also plays the guitar really fast, and he currently performs as part of a band called Totally Snake. It’s a classical group. Prior to joining Emma, Jimmy worked for The Bomb Shelter Studio in Nashville and Marian Records in nearby Goodlettsville and spent nearly five years working with the mentally handicapped through the Cardinal Center in Indiana and the Rochelle Center in Nashville. In his spare time, Jimmy enjoys looking a little bit like Neve Campbell and not being anywhere near the three things that freak him the bleep out: namely, balloons, horses and clowns. We’re with you on the clowns, Neve.
Margaret Tyler
Margaret joined Emma after having worked for a number of years in urban and environmental planning, effectively designing environments that make the most of buildings, transportation, land and people. Now she does that for the Emma environment, helping us make the most of our buildings, transportation, land and people, where by "buildings" we mean people, and by "transportation" we also mean people. Basically we just have people, and that's what Margaret focuses on helping us make the most of. Margaret obtained her masters in Urban and Environmental Planning from the University of Virginia (she did her undergrad work at North Carolina) and then spent three years at the Nashville-based firm Gresham, Smith and Partners. She's into transportation planning, green living and Americana music. Oh, and she's one of the nicest people you'll ever meet, and that's assuming you've met a lot of nice people along the way and are probably thinking as you read this that the nicest person you know is nicer than Margaret. That person is not, and if you ever plan on entering your nice friend in a Nice-Off, and you see someone named Margaret on the competitor roster, don't say we didn't warn you.
Will Weaver
Will Weaver is one of the co-founders here at Emma. He sets the design direction and coordinates all things technological. He is also very tall. It was Will who proposed one afternoon in late 2001, over assorted coffee drinks, that a company be started, one that might create a Web-based service to help businesses of all shapes and sizes. Being the tallest person at the table, others felt inclined to listen and, during pauses in conversation, to nod vigorously. Before helping start Emma, Will served as the Web Director for Nashville-based custom-publisher Hammock Publishing and as a founding member of Smallbusiness.com. Will is a graduate of The University of The South, known in more casual circles as Sewanee.
David Weintraub
David is a senior member of our sales staff and is a rival of Kris’s for the title of Biggest Mets Fan in the Office. (Incidentally, the title of Biggest Maroon 5 Fan remains completely wide open.) A Brooklyn native and NYU grad, David may or may not wear mostly blue-and-orange clothing in honor of the aforementioned Mets, and he may or may not know the pitching staff’s combined ERA for each of the past seven seasons. David also wields a most impressive CD collection from his years managing a Virgin Megastore and Sam Goody store in Greenwich Village, though not so impressive may be the presence of Poison’s Greatest Hits in said collection. What can we say - every rose has its thorn. We’ve been instructed to insert the phrase “Go Mets!” here to avoid having a certain band’s greatest hits disc thrown at us any moment now.
Marcus Whitney
Marcus is part of the Emma Emeritus team, having joined us early and stayed to help shape the Emma product and culture in ways we can’t count. Which is more a testament to the scope of Marcus’s contribution than it is a reflection on our counting skills, which are quite strong. Marcus is a frequent contributor to fine publications and a speaker at noteworthy events (he’s popular, okay?) and will remain a part of the Emma family forever. Which is like 12 years, if our math is correct.
Elizabeth Williams
Elizabeth’s friends are really good bowlers, and if you’re planning on starting a bowling league we’d suggest being really careful how many friends you allow people to bring, and by “people” we mean “Elizabeth.” When she isn’t busy starting Emma bowling leagues or stockpiling her team with ringers, Elizabeth can be found designing campaign stationery for Emma customers. In addition to her design chops (among the chops is a talent for figure drawing, which she once spent a year doing in Italy), Elizabeth also boasts an exceptionally dry sense of humor and a drawer full of colored socks, but surprisingly few jokes about colored socks. Elizabeth is a fan of designer Marian Bantjes and a follower of the design collective Hugo & Marie. And her own designs are inspired by female intuition, past, present and future tenses, her perception of culture, books, movies, music, nature, food, sleep, people, basically all nouns, fine art, love, humor, humor and humor. If you’re about to sit down and create a list of things that inspire you, don’t, because Elizabeth’s is better.
Annie Williams
Annie Williams is our director of channel partnerships, forging relationships with people and businesses around the globe. Annie was Emma’s very first employee, beating Allison by mere hours in the same way twins can be born at virtually the same time and yet one of them, to use Annie’s terminology, is the total supreme ruler by virtue of having arrived first. If you’re a large organization working with Emma, no doubt you’ve met Annie. If you’re a musical theater graduate from St. Louis’s Webster University Conservatory of Theater Arts (known in more casual circles as Webster Conservatory of Theater Arts), you too have probably met Annie. Prior to joining Emma, Annie was a sales and marketing coordinator of special projects for BMG Entertainment in New York.
Mark Wong
Mark is a software engineer who spends a lot of time working on our database architecture and code. Which means he's fluent in PostgreSQL, which is like French but isn't spoken aloud and is virtually useless getting around France. Mark's a hard worker and an early riser, with reports placing him in the Emma shop as early as 6am (though if you think about it, since no one else is there at 6, who's reporting this, exactly?). Mark is among the quietest Emma staffers around (a tie with his colleague, Jay Hargis), and one of the nicest (a tie with everyone but Sara, who regularly pulls pranks on people who may write bios and who may still be smarting over the recent phone-wrapped-in-rubber-bands routine of Sara's, which seemed like a really un-funny way to waste a bunch of rubber bands, thank you). Mark is into photography and travel, and he's used the latter as an opportunity to master the full process surrounding the former - from taking the pictures, to framing them and ultimately hanging them on the wall. He's also applied his photography in around Portland, a town in which he was born and is happy to continue calling home. Take that, France.
Chris Wood
Chris is a software developer for Emma and *may* be the Black Crowes’ #1 Fan. Note to other Black Crowes #1 Fans: You’re on notice, friends. In addition to catching the Crowes whenever he can, Chris doesn’t just do something, he does “the fire out of” something. It’s really his way of giving 110% to the things he likes. Here are the things he likes: Slash, the Opera, Nashville Ballet, Olean Chips Before They Realized that Olean Chips Might Be a Really Bad Idea, Not Changing a Planet’s Status Without Counting the Number of Textbooks and Childhood Rhymes You’re About to Really Muck Up, and Candles. He makes his own - candles, that is, and once worked for a company developing a frequency quadrupled module for specific infrared lasers (the 266nm model). We prefer to think of Chris as the dude who makes candles. It’s simpler that way. Chris graduated from MTSU with a B.S. in Physics and a minor in math, a subject which he studied the fire out of, to be sure.
Jesse Worstell
Jesse is a senior member of our billing team, helping people who have questions about their Emma invoices. Not so much people who are injured or in some sort of danger because he's not a doctor, he suffers from vertigo and the sight of saliva makes him squeamish. Prior to joining us, Jesse worked in the circulation department of a newspaper, fronted and managed a band called Blue Star Highway, worked as a barista and served as a substitute teacher. At one point he was also something called a 'Technogym Trainer.' You would think it’d be a lot easier to think up something funny to say about a Technogym Trainer. Sadly, it is not. Jesse is a graduate of Indiana Wesleyan University.