Colin is an entrepreneurial leader with a passion for helping organizations and businesses grow. He has been recognized by Google for various achievements in marketing as well as his role advising Adwords agencies and SMES.
Colin has been engaged in the Georgian startup ecosystem in increasingly deep ways for the past two years, as founder of the renewed Startup Grind Tbilisi chapter and convener of startup ecosystem improvement process including: Startup Grind Tbilisi, Organizing a delegation of Georgian startups to Startup Grind Global in Silicon Valley, Participating in the US Embassy Working Group on Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Moderating of German-Georgian Startup Forum funded by GIZ and the German Embassy, Planning and facilitation of the Startup Ecosystem Strategy Retreat, a 2-day retreat in Kvareli Georgia involving 30 top leaders in the startup ecosystem
He is founder of a startup project not yet made public, and an advisor for VREX Immersive, a travel marketing platform using Virtual Reality.
Colin has consulted with numerous US companies, incubators, accelerators including award-winning ones in his home state of Ohio. He has conducted trainings for startups and diverse business audiences.
Before he switched to for-profit work he led regional and national nonprofit organizations in the US including Rural Action (director of the sustainable economies section) and National Network of Forest Practitioners. Most of his work focused on sustainable economic development, so he has over 20 years of history working with a wide variety of founders and companies from tiny rural microenterprises to nonprofit-based social enterprises to advising on big-picture entrepreneurial economy projects for donors such as Ford Foundation.
His personal founding experiences have included a fair-trade import business, Bali Karma, which received awards such as Best New Business in Athens Ohio. Currently he operates Root Deeper Marketing, a profit-driven marketing consultancy. In Georgia he is launching Georgian Ventures a startup ecosystem advisory company and a not-yet-announced project with a Georgian co-founder.
He currently lives in Tbilisi with his Georgian-Ukranian wife and delightful children Daniel and Nicholas.