Executive Buzz Bios

TJ Houk is the Chief Data Officer at Trupanion. He joined the organization in 2009 and currently leads a team of actuaries, mathematicians, data scientists, and finance professionals in analytics across Trupanion. The analytics team is independent, which encourages objectivity, innovation, and facilitation of cooperation and communication between departments. By maintaining robust and consistent data, Trupanion is effective in identifying high performance, particularly as it relates to value creation for the organization.

TJ is an Associate in the Society of Actuaries and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting and Finance from Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington.

Ian Lurie is the Founder of Portent, a Clearlink Digital Agency; Clearlink acquired Portent in 2017. Ian is presently Executive Vice President of Marketing Services at Clearlink, heading up Portent, which is now the agency arm of the parent company.

Portent provides paid and organic search and social media, content, and analytics services to B2B and B2C brands including Patagonia, Princess, Linode, and Tumi. Ian’s professional specialties and favorite topics are marketing strategy, search, history, and all things nerdy. He spends far too much time reviewing Amazon search patents, Google rankings and natural language processing theory. His educational background includes a B.A. in History from UC San Diego and a degree in Law from UCLA. Ian recently published Technical SEO Best Practices - a free guide to Technical SEO. You can find Ian on Twitter at @portentint

Belinda Rodman is the Customer Experience Strategy Lead at Cliff Consulting, a boutique, women-owned consulting firm based in the Bay Area with a 35+ year track record providing strategic leadership to plan and execute complex projects. They specialize in a people-first and collaborative approach, to assist clients to develop and launch new ideas and visions.

Belinda has extensive experience as both a business leader and consultant across many disciplines and industries, including software, banking, technology, retail and healthcare. As the CIO of Advent Software, Belinda was responsible for Global IT and Facilities worldwide, including strategic business and global technology transformation. Her passion today is helping companies maximize, preserve and grow sales revenue by ensuring a customer first approach.

Mike Blahnik is back as the emcee for the 2018 ISPI Executive Buzz panel. Mike has served as the co-emcee for ISPI’s annual conference, and began serving as emcee for the Executive Buzz key note panel in 2016. He is a project manager and lead performance consultant at Innovative Learning Group. Prior to joining ILG, Mike earned his MS in Industrial Organizational Psychology from Western Michigan University. He is also a former president of the Michigan Chapter of ISPI, one of the premier ISPI Chapters world-wide.