Meet our team

Our executive team combines decades of experience from Adobe, Sun Microsystems, Disney, Google, eBay, Motorola and others. We've traveled and worked in over 30 countries. We are old enough that we have the experience to pull this off, but not too old to believe the people who tell us it's impossible. We have moved our families to the developing world (Kathmandu, Nepal) where we use our passion, skills, education and experiences to change the world one person at a time. Starting with ourselves!

Mark Sears

Founder and CEO

After doing tech startups in Canada and the US for about 10 years, Mark has spent the last 4 years living in Nepal and using his unique blend of technology and business experience to develop CloudFactory towards creating work for 1 million people.

He started his career as a software developer with Sun Microsystems before finding his groove in the world of startups. Moving into technology evangelism and product management roles he helped a 5 person startup grow to 130 employees across 4 international offices after raising $48 million in venture capital. Mark then raised angel investment, launched and managed his own startup company for 6 years before coming to Nepal and starting the CloudFactory adventure.

Todd Chalfin

VP Business Development

Todd brings over 15 years of enterprise sales leadership to CloudFactory. His career has focused on finding new ways to use and share some of the most disruptive technologies on the planet. Prior to joining CloudFactory, Todd served on the leadership team at mobile security pioneer Good Technology Inc. after helping to take the company private from Motorola in 2009. Over the next 3 years they grew the company from 30 to 600 employees and $200+ million in annual sales. During his career he has forged significant partnerships with the likes of Dell, CSC, IBM, HP, General Dynamics, AT&T, Verizon and Sprint.

Todd leads our US offices out of Durham, NC and has a heart for seeing the world of work transformed. He holds a B.S. degree from Cornell University.

Robert Penner

VP Technology

Robert is a multi-talented, multi-lingual man of mystery - many would say a true renaissance man. He worked at Adobe as a Senior Engineer and Walt Disney as a Technical Architect.

He authored a popular technology book and his "Penner easing functions" are a defacto standard that power numerous animation libraries used by millions of developers around the world (jQuery, Adobe Flash, Flex, etc). He brings passion for TDD, Pair Programming, Beautiful Code, and Scrum to his leading of technology efforts at CloudFactory.

Evan Kubicek

VP Workforce

Before joining CloudFactory Evan was working with Professionals International to provide business training and coaching services throughout the developing world. Entrepreneurship, teaching university level business courses, life coaching, construction, consulting.... if there is something that needs to get done, he's probably done it.

Evan’s work has taken him to Mexico, Cambodia, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Haiti, Morocco, Burkina Faso, and now Nepal. As VP of Workforce, Evan is focused on raising up 1 million workers throughout the developing world.

Karmath Dangol

VP Engineering

Prior to joining CloudFactory, Karmath held leadership positions at two of the top software outsourcing companies in Nepal after returning from the US where he lived with his family for over a decade.

In the States he was an Engineering Contractor at Google Inc and also worked at eBay Inc. as Senior Manager of Internet Marketing Solutions. Karmath holds a degree in Bachelors of Science in Computer Science & Mathematics from Metropolitan State College of Denver.

Laurel Sears

VP Finance

As a Chartered Accountant of Canada, Laurel is navigating the financial side of the Hong Kong and Nepal corporations.

She started her career in public accounting with Collins Barrow before moving to the University of Calgary as a Senior Financial Analyst. This is where she received the opportunity to move overseas and gain international finance experience as the Director of Finance at one of the university's international campuses.

Kailash Badu

Product Manager, Client Platform

Kailash is responsible for formulating CloudFactory’s product strategy and driving its execution. In this role, he keeps a tab on the industry, envisions new ideas, and works with our engineers to turn these ideas into winning features for our platform and clients.

With 7 years of hands-on experience in software engineering, he still finds time once in a while to hack together some code (mostly big data and machine learning related stuff). Kailash is extremely passionate about startups and firmly believes in the power of technology to not just disrupt industries but also transform the lives of everyone in the planet.

John Snowden

Director of Solutions

John was born and raised in Seattle, studied acting in college before discovering his excitement for web development. He did front and back-end web development work for 10+ years at Genex in Los Angeles, where he worked with clients such as Honda, Acura, KB Home, Warner Bros, and Better Homes and Gardens.

He loves jQuery passionately, but not as much as he loves his wife Rachel and sons Isaiah and Ezekiel. After recently moving, John and his family are excited to make Nepal their new home. John enjoys film and television, baseball, American football, and silly addicting games like Angry Birds.

Robina Maharjan

Director of Operations

Robina oversees all administrative operations at CloudFactory and uses her approach of “getting things done” to support growth, create happy faces and execute on all the wild ideas from colleagues.

Prior to joining CloudFactory, Robina was the Head of Production at Incessant Rain Animation Studios where she oversaw all studio operations including the production of several projects for Disney, Columbia Pictures and Sony. She also brings diverse work experience from banks, venture capital, education and social sector. Robina enjoys traveling and art; and dreams to travel the world with her husband and daughter in the coming years.

Bikash Poudel

Sr. Engineering Manager

Bikash is not only a major technical leader at CloudFactory but he was also a key inspiration for the company back at the very beginning. Seeing his raw talent and passion for software engineering, Mark started to teach him Ruby on Rails four years ago and today he now mentors and guides our whole engineering team on a daily basis.

He is an internationally Certified Scrum Master (CSM) who loves Ruby, Rails, agile development and will never regret the decision to leave .NET development many years ago.

Sarwagya Pandey

Sr. Production Manager, Solutions

Sarwagya manages clients and internal teams to ensure successful setup, integration and management of projects at CloudFactory. He jumps back and forth from email, basecamp, wireframing, data analysis, task form design and software development with little effort.

After working at a major tech company in Nepal, Sarwagya joined us 4 years ago and has been a major leader in the company ever since. He is an internationally Certified Scrum Master (CSM) who loves using his technical, communication and project management skills to contribute to the development of his country.

Sunil Varghese

Workforce Manager

Sunil was born and raised up in Nepal. He has over 10 years of experience teaching in colleges and being an Editor for a reputed book publisher. His days of being a teacher helped him build life-long friendships with students across Nepal from varied backgrounds.

Now he spends his days managing, training and mentoring our exploding workforce which also includes many college students and recent graduates. He is passionate about his faith in God, beautiful wife and son, and music (he's an avid composer too!).