BCG Digital Ventures adds three partners to London team
BCG Digital Ventures, BCG’s design, digital and incubation arm, has added three new partners to its team in the UK: Charmaine Eggberry, John Kuolt and Mark Zaleski. All three advisers will report to London-based Partner and Managing Director Ajay Chowdhury.
Since being founded early 2014, after The Boston Consulting Group roped in a large team of consultants from Booz Digital (the Digital arm of Booz & Company*), BCG Digital Ventures (BCGDV) has seen impressive growth. Over the past two and a half years BCGDV has expanded to a headcount of over 400 designers, product managers, engineers, serial entrepreneurs and investors spanning four continents. The firm operates as a separate arm of BCG – the consultancy wants to, due to the different nature of its activities and the make-up of the landscape, set BCGDV apart from its traditional strategy consulting and management consulting activities.
To meet growing demand from UK-based companies, BCGDV has recently added three seasoned advisers to its 60 strong team in London.
Charmaine Eggberry is a digital business pioneer with deep hardware and software expertise. She served as CEO of Plan B Consulting and held leadership positions at digital accelerator Wayra, Nokia and Research in Motion, where she led the global launch of BlackBerry Pearl and managed an $11 billion P&L and redesign of BlackBerry’s GTM. She currently holds seats on the boards of recently listed AI software robot provider Blue Prism, identity intelligence specialist GB Group, Avanti Communications and is Chairperson of InsureTech scaleup Buzzmove.
John Kuolt is a computer science expert from Silicon Valley. As Cofounder of IQzone, he helped raise millions in venture capital before going on to invent the world’s first social address book. By launching with Facebook he was able to get this software pre- embedded on nearly every major mobile handset manufacturer in the world. Kuolt continues to play an active role in the venture capital world – a $128 billion market globally according to KPMG – sitting on the boards of Harvard Business Angels London and Granatus Ventures.
Mark Zaleski is an executive and seasoned investor with broad international experience. He served as the Chairman and CEO of Dailymotion leading it to 65 million unique visitors and 1 billion video views per month. Zaleski also served as the CEO of QXL ricardo for 7 years prior to it being sold for nearly £1 billion. He has also held senior executive roles at Webvan Group, Nielsen Corporation and Federal Express Corporation. Zaleski currently sits on various boards and serves as an advisor at a number of tech companies including GoCardless, Show My Homework, Spotahome and Dynistics.
Commenting on the additions, Ajay Chowdhury, Managing Director at BCGDV, says “We’ve seen huge growth in our UK business over the past two years where many of our blue chip clients are based. This expansion cements our commitment to London and the UK and having entrepreneurs with proven track records like Charmaine, John and Mark in the London partner group will allow us to continue to build powerful digital businesses for our corporate partners.”
Prior to joining BCGDV in February last year, Chowdhury was formerly CEO of Seatwave, a European online ticketing marketplace that was sold to Ticketmaster. Prior to this, he was CEO of ComQi, a global omni-channel retail technology company before which he co-founded IDG Ventures Europe (IDGVE), a $100 million European venture capital fund. In August Chowdhury was appointed by Her Majesty The Queen as a Trustee of Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity responsible for the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace, Kew Palace, Banqueting House and Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland.
BCGDV’s founder, Jeff Schumacher, adds that he is delighted to welcome “three seasoned executives” to the firm’s London office.
* Booz & Company was acquired by Big Four firm PwC in October 2013, and after closing rebranded as Strategy&.
