Ira E. Ritter - Chairman of the Board

Mr. Ritter has over 40 years experience creating, building and operating multi-faceted business enterprises. Currently he is CEO of Andela Group Inc., a company that provides strategic business management services with a specialization in healthcare.

Formerly, Mr. Ritter served as the President and Chairman of the nation’s largest wholesale distributor of healthcare products. Simultaneously, he worked as CEO of Rockwood, a company that created private label brands for GNC and provided high-end in-house HBA products for other national retailers including K-Mart. His experience also includes over fifteen years as CEO of RG Publishing where he published best-selling monthly national consumer magazines and of book publishing houses that included Pegasus, Front Row Center, Readers’ Guild and Hampshire House, where he released over 200 book titles annually. Additionally, he was involved in telecommunications as Chairman of Oak Media, a division of Oak Industries. While operating its ONTV channel, he obtained the first home team broadcast rights for professional Los Angeles and Chicago sporting events.
 
Having been appointed by three Governors, Mr. Ritter has served on several State of California Commissions, and currently is a Commissioner on the California Prison Industry Authority. In 1981, Mr. Ritter was honored with the City of Hope’s Man of the Year award.

Andrew J. Ritter - Board Member

Mr. Ritter has been studying the field of lactose intolerance for over 15 years and is considered a worldwide leading expert on the topic. Mr. Ritter has been at the forefront of lactose intolerance research, working and collaborating with other leading experts in lactose intolerance. In 1997, he invented a prototype program called Lactagen® to help reduce symptoms of lactose intolerance. He subsequently founded Ritter Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in 2004 and engaged other leading lactose intolerance researchers to join his team in developing the first every treatment for lactose intolerance.

Mr. Ritter received his bachelor’s degree in Political Science and a minor in Business from the University of Southern California. Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan appointed Mr. Ritter to serve as a City Commissioner from 2000-2002. He is the youngest Commissioner to be appointed in the history of Los Angeles. In 2007, The Los Angeles Business Journal recognized Mr. Ritter as one of the "Top Twenty Entrepreneurs in their 20s" in Los Angeles.

Steve Markowitz - Board Member

Steve Markowitz is managing director of Durant Capital Management, LLC. Prior to Durant, Steve was founding chairman and CEO of MyPoints.com, the membership marketing company that he took public on NASDAQ in 1999. During his tenure, Steve led MyPoints in growing membership to 16MM consumers and annual revenue to $64MM. Before MyPoints, he worked as a securities analyst at Fidelity Investments and as a financial journalist at Dow Jones & Co.

Steve earned his MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and his A.B. in East Asian Languages (high honors) also from UC Berkeley. Steve is a guest lecturer in the Entrepreneurship and New Venture Finance courses at Haas.

Noah Doyle - Board Member

Noah Doyle possesses over a decade of direct, consumer, and international high-tech marketing and business development experience specifically in the arenas of retail, software, and electronics.

A co-founder of MyPoints.com, Doyle helped MyPoints establish the industry’s first true opt-in e-mail marketing solution and later helped refine it’s offering to the industry’s first loyalty direct marketing solution. Until 1997, Doyle served as Director of Marketing at MyPoints, helping to cultivate the Company’s first quarter million members. Doyle later assumed the role of the Company’s international business development.

Through carefully selected strategic alliances, Doyle facilitated MyPoints’ tri-continental development and brought, for the first time, loyalty centric opt-in e-mail marketing to Japan and the UK. Noah currently heads all of the Company's business development initiatives.

Prior to MyPoints.com, Doyle managed international OEM product marketing and sales at Matsushita Graphic Communications Systems in Tokyo, Japan, where he was responsible for $60-million in annual revenues and worked with top global clients including Pitney Bowes and Hewlett-Packard.

At Matsushita, Doyle played a key role in developing the first inkjet printer-based fax machine, a joint development project with Hewlett-Packard. Doyle also chaired the management board of the Berkeley campus bookstore during a major restructuring in 1996. The bookstore generates $17 million in sales annually. Doyle has also held marketing and management roles at Oracle and Rational Software.

Doyle is a graduate of the University of California Berkeley with a BA in Economics, and an MBA with certificates in Global Management and the Management of Technology, as well as a fellowship in the Management of Technology in Japan. Doyle speaks fluent Japanese.