| Website | devenspear.com |
| @devenspear | |
| Birthplace | Greenville, NC |
Deven Spear is a serial entrepreneur and visionary leader of technology driven companies. His diverse background in real estate and technology along with consulting, business management, and marketing makes him particularly adept at recognizing opportunities in emerging markets.
His career began in the early 80’s with general contracting companies and by 1988 Spear started Keith & Kyle Corporation, which primarily built custom homes in LandFall, a Jack Nicklaus and Pete Dye master planned community. Keith and Kyle afforded Spear the opportunity to not only manage a growing business but work directly with homeowners, realtors/brokers, architects and community developers.
By the early 90’s, Spear seized an opportunity to fulfill his passion for computing, and started a new career in database consulting. He formed Information Design Corporation in 1991, which became his third business, and provided database design and development services to large enterprise customers like Nortel Networks and the State of North Carolina. Projects in custom application development and legacy systems integration established a platform for Spear to “think of data†in new and imaginative ways. By 1995, he recognized the emerging interest in multimedia technologies and grew the company into a team of programmers and designers to provide disc-based training and sales presentations to corporate sales teams throughout the U.S.
IDC’s reputation for developing business oriented multimedia applications became so popular that he joined forces with future BrightDoor Co-Founder, Michael Worthington and formed VisionFactory in 1996. As the company’s CEO, he pioneered a vision to combine data driven personalization with interactive sales environments and by 1999 the eSpace concept was born. VisionFactory designed and built eSpace environments across North America for Fortune 100 customers including Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, Unisys, NCR, and others. Spear also leveraged his construction background to collaborate with leading architectural firms including HOK and Gensler in designing Executive Briefing Centers for eSpace customers worldwide. The 6 million dollar Nortel Networks Executive Briefing Center earned VisionFactory the Business Week IDEA award in 2000.
As mobile sales solutions later emerged, VisionFactory’s iNav interactive sales systems became a standard for high tech companies in venues like the CEBIT in Hanover, Germany and Telecom 99 in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2001, Spear and friend Jim Gilmore (author of “The Experience Economyâ€) collaborated on bringing highly orchestrated sales experiences to real estate developers including Marriott Vacation Club International.
These efforts shifted Spear’s focus back to real estate. He saw the opportunity to utilize the proprietary software that VisionFactory developed and provide a vertical market solution to the real estate industry. He along with Co-Founder Michael Worthington, started BrightDoor Systems in 2005 to give real estate developers the same advanced CRM and intelligent sales systems used by Fortune 500 companies. Today BrightDoor has real estate customers throughout North America and is expanding globally, including the Middle East.
Spear holds a Bachelor of Science degree in marketing and management from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He has been a respected speaker, presenter, and panelist at conferences and tradeshows in both the technology and real estate sectors as well as venture capital events. Spear and his wife Nancy live in Cary, North Carolina with their two sons.
