Vanguard Senior Leadership
Rod D. Martin, J.D.
Founder and Chairman
Rod D. Martin, Founder and Chairman of TheVanguard.Org, is a noted futurist and advocate for the eradication of poverty and the expansion of liberty throughout the world. A writer, speaker and technology entrepreneur, he is also President of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA), a past Chairman of The Arlington Group's National Security Team, and a member of the Board of Governors of the Council for National Policy.
Dr. Martin is an active investor and is a director of several technology companies. He has previously served as a senior advisor to PayPal.com founder Peter Thiel, most notably during PayPal's IPO and subsequent merger with dot-com giant eBay, and as Director of Policy Planning and Research for former Arkansas Governor (and Presidential candidate) Mike Huckabee. He is deeply involved in charitable work aimed at alleviating global poverty, has raised significant sums for private K-12 scholarships for disadvantaged children in the United States, and serves on the boards of several foundations, including Hugh O'Brian Youth Leadership (HOBY) and Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Dr. Martin studied political and economic thought at Cambridge University in Great Britain and was elected student body president at Baylor Law School. He has served as faculty for the Alliance Defense Fund's Blackstone Fellowship program, belongs to the Federalist Society and the Sons of the American Revolution (General Joseph Martin Chapter, named for his fifth great grandfather), and holds Life Membership in the Gun Owners of America and Patron Life Membership in the National Rifle Association. He has also been named player of the week on TV's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
Dr. Martin edited and co-authored Thank You President Bush along with numerous leading conservatives such as Ed Meese, James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly and Grover Norquist, and has three additional books forthcoming. His writings have appeared in such publications as Human Events, WorldNetDaily, The American Spectator, World magazine, the Manchester Union-Leader, the San Francisco Examiner and Diario Las Américas. He lives on Florida's beautiful Emerald Coast with his wife Sherri, with whom he dotes on their three beloved children.
Sherri R. Martin
Co-Chairman
Sherri Ross Martin is Co-Chairman of TheVanguard.Org. She is currently serving her fourth term representing Florida on the board of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) and her third term as chairman of the NFRA's membership committee; she is also a member of the board of directors of the Florida Republican Assembly. She has previously served as a group home mother for retarded and handicapped adults, has been instrumental in the founding and development of Christian schools across the eastern United States, and was the founding principal of Mountain Top Christian School (now Chattanooga Christian School) in Tennessee. She holds a triple-disciplinary B.A. from Covenant College, and is the much beloved mother of three.
Eric M. Jackson
Executive Director
(Chief Operating Officer)
Eric Jackson is TheVanguard.Org's Executive Director (Chief Operating Officer). An award-winning author and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Jackson previously oversaw marketing for the online payments giant PayPal.com, where as one of its very first employees he helped catapult the startup dot-com from zero to 40 million users, from losing $10 million per month to profitability, to the tech sector's first successful post-crash initial public offering, and to a $1.5 billion merger with auctions powerhouse eBay. Most crucially, Jackson developed the methodology to transition PayPal from a free to paid service, the first dot-com to achieve that essential feat.
After leaving PayPal, Jackson founded the independent conservative publisher World Ahead Media and served as its Chairman and CEO, guiding the company to national prominence, a NYT bestseller and multiple book club selections-of-the-month, as well as profitability in its third year of operations followed by its acquisition by WorldNetDaily in January 2008. A longtime advocate of free markets and traditional values, Jackson previously served on the alumni board of The Stanford Review, and has appeared on numerous TV shows including Fox News and Comedy Central's “The Daily Show.” He has been quoted in publications ranging from Publishers Weekly to Forbes, and has lectured for the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation. His book, The PayPal Wars, won the Writers Notes Book Award and was hailed by Tom Peters as "the best description of business strategy unfolding in a world changing at warp speed." He earned a degree in economics with honors from Stanford University.
Gil Amelio, Ph.D.
Gil Amelio is TheVanguard.Org's Finance Chairman and Senior Systems Strategist. He also serves as Lead Director of AT&T. For three decades, Dr. Amelio has been a transformative leader, in business and technology, in Silicon Valley and around the globe. The savior of National Semiconductor -- taking it (as CEO) from its worst-ever quarter to its best in just three years -- and the man who put a dying Apple Computer on the road back to health, Amelio's leadership of Fortune 500 companies has directly created increased investor value of more than $9 billion. Since 1998, he has been a venture capitalist focusing on early-stage startups. A former director and chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association, Amelio has since 1996 been an advisor to the Malaysia Multimedia Super Corridor and to Malaysia's Prime Minister. He is a current or past director of Chiron, Pro-Pharmaceuticals, Pacific Telesis, Sematech, the Georgia Tech Advisory Board (as chairman) and the American Film Institute. He is an IEEE Fellow, has been awarded 16 patents, earned his Ph.D. in physics at Georgia Tech, and is the author of three books, An American Imperative (1993), Profit from Experience (1995) and On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple (1998), the latter two of which were business best sellers.
Kellyanne Conway, J.D.
Kellyanne Conway is TheVanguard.Org's Research Director and Senior Political Strategist, as well as President and CEO of the polling company™, inc. / WomenTrend. She has provided primary research and advice for clients in 46 of the 50 states and has directed hundreds of demographic and attitudinal survey projects for political races, trade associations, and Fortune 100 companies. An attorney, a nationally acclaimed expert on women consumers, and a regular commentator on national network and cable television, Conway has worked for a diverse portfolio of corporate, political and non-profit entities, including Major League Baseball, ABC News, Lifetime Television, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Cendant, Grocery Manufacturers of America, Mass Connections, the Heritage Foundation, the Republican National Committee, the National Rifle Association, and the Family Research Council.
Conway is co-author (with Celinda Lake) of What Women Really Want: How American Women Are Quietly Erasing Political, Racial, Class, and Religious Lines to Change the Way We Live. She was recognized as the most accurate predictor of the 2004 elections, for which she received The Washington Post’s “Crystal Ball” award.
Nancy Bocskor
Dubbed “The Democracy Coach” by leading German newspaper Die Welt, Nancy Bocskor has already had a stunning career, teaching citizens in the U.S. and around the world how to communicate with passion and affect change in their communities. She is a professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, and for the past five years served as Curriculum Committee chair for the Women’s Campaign School at Yale. She has served as Director of Opposition Research for the National Republican Congressional Committee, Deputy Director of Communications for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Chief of Staff for Senator Jon Kyle (R-AZ), Chief Legislative Assistant for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and Education Director for Gingrich’s American Solutions. Her international work has impacted much of the globe, from Mexico to Russia, England to Eastern Europe, Outer Mongolia and the entire Middle East. In October 2009, she was named one of the “Top Ten Who are Changing the World of Politics and the Internet” at the World E*Democracy Forum in Paris. Campaigns and Elections named her one of America’s “Rising Stars of Politics”, she has been featured in a PBS documentary, and she has served as a political analyst on CNN.
Adrian Otto
Adrian Otto is one of America’s foremost experts on large distributed systems, clustering and cloud computing. He is Chief of Research at the Rackspace Cloud (NYSE: RAX), the fastest growing sector of a $629 million revenue stream at the largest web hosting company in the world. Since 1995 he founded or co-founded three successful startups, and acted as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Architect at two more; all five were acquired or are still operating today. Perhaps most significantly, he has personally provided large scale web hosting solutions for a decade to the Drudge Report, and more recently to Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart.com, BigGovernment.com and BigJournalism.com, as well as the web’s leading conservative news site, WorldNetDaily. No one on Earth has more experience keeping top-ranked conservative websites running, much less fighting off sophisticated left-wing hackers, than our own Adrian Otto.
Ashley Bradford
Ashley Bradford is at the forefront of web-based data management systems, constructing secure data management and informatics technologies with clients in education, national defense, and state law enforcement agencies. As the Chief Technology Officer of CritiqueIt, he created a multi-media document platform that allows users to post audio and video responses to text. With Mideo Systems Inc. Bradford has developed highly secure enterprise image analysis and management systems for customers such as AFDIL, DOD, FBI, LASD, AZDPS and the U.S. Secret Service. He was also lead researcher alongside Ames Laboratory for an NIJ funded grant to develop protocol and technology for passing highly sensitive case-based forensic data for peer review across agencies. Bradford previously worked as Director of Technology for the machine-visioning think-tank Video Imaging Institute and with Yale University Libraries where he conceptualized and implemented technology used at Sterling and Yale Law librar ies for records and HR management. Bradford has an undergraduate degree from Bowling Green University and a graduate degree from Yale.
Brad Smith, Esq.
Legal Committee Chairman
Bradley A. Smith is a former Chairman of the Federal Election Commission and one of the nation’s foremost experts on campaign finance law. Once called, “the most sought after witness in Congress” on campaign finance issues, Smith has authored over 40 articles on campaign finance reform, appearing in academic publications such as the Yale Law Journal and Georgetown Law Journal, and popular publications such as The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and National Review. He has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor, Hardball, Hannity & Colmes, Bill Moyers, the Lehrer News Hour, Fox News Special Report, ABC News, Washington Journal, and numerous other national and local television and radio programs. As an FEC Commissioner, the Wall Street Journal called him “the only honorable man in this bordello.” Smith currently serves as the Josiah H. Blackmore II/Shirley M. Nault Designated Professor of Law at Capital University Law School, as Chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics, and as Chairman of TheVanguard.Org’s Legal Committee.
Cleta Mitchell, Esq.
General Counsel
Cleta Mitchell is TheVanguard.Org's General Counsel and a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Foley & Lardner, LLP. She has more than 30 years of experience in law, politics and public policy, advising corporations, nonprofit organizations, candidates, campaigns, and individuals on state and federal election and campaign finance law, as well as compliance issues related to lobbying, ethics and financial disclosure. She normally practices before the Federal Election Commission and similar federal and state enforcement agencies, and is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia, the State of Oklahoma, the Supreme Court of the United States and federal district and appellate courts.
Mitchell has previously served as legal counsel for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Rifle Association and the Term Limits Legal Institute. She is a former member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, where she chaired the House Appropriations and Budget Committee, and served on the executive committee of the National Conference of State Legislatures. She currently serves on the board of directors of the American Conservative Union, the Board of Governors for the Republican National Lawyers Association, and the board of directors of the Washington Scholarship Fund, a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization committed to expanding and improving educational options in Washington, D.C.
Mitchell has testified before Congress numerous times and is a frequent speaker and guest commentator on election law and politics. In 1999, she authored The Rise of America's Two National Pastimes: Baseball and the Law, published by the University of Michigan Law Review.
“MoveOn grew from a Silicon Valley vision, Silicon Valley money, Silicon Valley talent. Conservatives have very little of that, and a great deal of what they do have is concentrated in TheVanguard.org.”
Human Events, "The Next MoveOn.org?"
