Leadership Team

Brad Mehl, CEO

Brad Mehl has over 25 years of experience in building start-ups, mid-market companies and billion dollar enterprises in over 20 industries.  His clients have included major media companies, ventures backed by Google and FORTUNE 500 companies.

Prior to Lively, he was Vice President at Penton, a $400MM+ business information and events company, where he led the marketing transformation of 60 brands that grew digital revenue by 50%.  As General Manager and Vice President of ThomasNet.com, he ran a $150 million online marketing platform that helped 20,000 manufacturing companies grow their businesses.  At LexisNexis, he had a dual role – General Manager of Specialty Products and head of marketing for Lawyers.com – where generated more clients for 35,000 law firms, growing revenue by 55% to $200MM.

In the 1990’s he ran marketing and international operations at CDnow, one of the first e-commerce companies, and revenue went from zero to $100 million dollars in three years, with a successful IPO. The company was acquired by Amazon.com and named Marketer of the Year by Promo Magazine.  He also was VP of Marketing and Business Development for one of the first social networks, years before Facebook, helping lead that company to an IPO filing. He has an MBA from the Stern School of Business at New York University, completed graduate work at Rotterdam School of Management in The Netherlands and has a B.S. from Cornell University.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Executive Vice President

Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Ph.D., is an award winning researcher, artist, writer, and an Assistant Professor at Lehman College / City University of New York. He received his Ph.D. in the Disruptive Design Team of the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department of Trinity College Dublin. His work focuses on the theme of “Deconstructing Networks”  with projects that critically challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction and experience.

His work has been exhibited and showcased at venues such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MOMA New York, ICA London, Palais du Tokyo,Tate Modern, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, and his project “Bumplist” is included in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. His writing has appeared in publications such as WIRED, Make, Gizmodo, Neural and more. His Scrapyard Challenge workshops have been held in over 14 countries in Europe, South America, North America, Asia, and Australia since 2003. He is the curator of the SIGGRAPH 2016 Art Gallery.

Kathy Kane – SVP Business Development

Kathy is a 20 year veteran of the events industry, who has conceived, built and scaled “Industry Defining” events in a variety of industries with a specialty in Information Technology.

Prior to Lively, Kathy founded OnTrack Communications, an event marketing agency that offers a complete set of services including event strategy, content development, experiential design and activation, sponsorship and exhibit modeling, sales, marketing, branding, execution, contract negotiation.  The company also built its own proprietary technology. 

Prior to founding OnTrack, Kathy was group vice president of Worldwide Events at Gartner, where she led the growth of events revenue from $10 million to over $130 million.  Kathy was instrumental in expanding Gartner’s international business by leveraging event brands and resources worldwide, which helped to maximize corporate revenue and profit. She was also the driving force in creating several strategic alliances which allowed for further expansion into new Markets.  Kathy did her bachelors studies at Marymount College in Business Administration with a Minor in Marketing.

Advisory Board

Benny DiCecca

Benny DiCecca, is the former Chief Executive Officer of Wellesley Information Services.

As CEO for 11 years and as previous President / COO for 7 years of WIS, Benny led WIS through explosive growth building an events business organically from 1 to 35 events and taking it from $0 to $40M+ in his first 5 years.  Benny’s entrepreneurial leadership led WIS through the great recession and pivoted the business from traditional publishing into a marketing services powerhouse building over 100 domestic and international events annually, plus bootstrapping the launch and growth of 12 new products delivering research and market data to connect most of the largest tech companies to customers – globally.

Prior to WIS, Benny has over 12 years of sales, marketing and leadership experience.  He started, when he was only 16 years old as a telemarketing representative for Newpro where he spent 8 years achieving record breaking sales results and growing into numerous sales leadership roles.  After leaving Newpro, Benny led as General Manager a successful turnaround of a struggling division of Transnational Travel returning it to profitability within the first year and growth in the second.  Benny was then recruited to build a new inside sales and field sales organization for small and mid size companies for Knowledge Impact (previously PDG).   While at PDG, Benny increased sales over 300% annually and defined and launched an entirely new sales approach helping PDG to grow from a regional company with 4 offices to over 20 offices in the US.

Benny is a frequent keynote speaker at business leadership conferences and media events, and presented at many colleges and universities.  He has served on the leadership board of SIPA, an association for publishers, is a member of the Young President’s Organization, and majored in marketing at Bentley University.

Benny resides in Massachusetts.  His passions include technology, travel, and fundraising for charities.

Leon Shapiro