Bezurk Team
Martin Symes
Chief Executive Officer
Martin joined Bezurk in March 2006 and with nearly 15 years of travel industry experience, the last six focused on the online travel space, is the veteran of the Bezurk team.
He was previously Executive Director, Commercial for ZUJI, where he was instrumental in establishing and building the business and brand to become Asia/Pacific's leading full service online travel retailer, with operations in six countries. Prior to ZUJI, he was a key member of the team involved in bringing Priceline's buyer-driven e-commerce model to Asia.
Martin has also held senior commercial roles at British Airways and American Airlines, where he was Managing Director, Asia Pacific from 1997-99.
Outside of the travel industry, Martin has significant experience in the financial services sector having held various positions with HSBC, Merrill Lynch and Fidelity Investments.
He has an MA degree in from Oxford University and an MBA from London Business School.
Martin is an avid traveler, having visited almost 100 countries, and a keen, but still not terribly good, golfer. He is married and has a one year old son who has already been to 9 countries!
Craig Hewett
Founder and Chief Marketing Officer
Craig has over ten years experience in the online travel distribution industry, starting out with Holiday Inn Worldwide (now known as InterContinental Hotels Group) back in 1995 when the company launched the world's first online booking engine. Craig left Holiday Inn Worldwide in 1999 to join the start up team for Priceline.com in Asia. Craig then joined the start up team for Zuji in Singapore where his tenure was cut short by the events of September 11th 2001.
Craig then rejoined InterContinental Hotels Group at the time when the company was ramping up its online technology investments across key Asia Pacific Markets. Craig developed the company's online strategy across the region with key local investments in China and Japan, successfully introducing local language capabilities into the group's global reservation system and marketing websites.
Realizing that travel and search engines are forever intertwined, Craig left InterContinental Hotels Group and founded Bezurk Travel Search in late 2005.
Craig has lived and worked in Cape Town, Sydney, Hong Kong and Singapore and often gets too distracted with anything to do with visual design - sucker for logo's and branding.
Ross Veitch
Chief Product Officer
Ross is a veteran of the Asian internet industry having established
Yahoo!s South East Asian operations in Singapore back in 1998. For 6
years he lead product development efforts across the region and managed
the production, engineering, surfing and customer care teams. Ross's
successful product launches span the range of Yahoo!'s services
including search, media, commerce, communications, mobile and community
products all scaled to handle millions of users per day. He also played
significant roles cutting deals with partners, crafting business
strategy and shaping Yahoo!s global product strategies. Under his
direction, Yahoo! has become the #1 internet destination across the
region.
Even before his involvement with Yahoo! Travel, Ross was no stranger to
the travel industry. He joined the Australian Tourist Commission in
Sydney in 1992 initially as a strategic analyst responsible for
crunching data and writing intelligence reports on the world's travel
markets. With the release of the Mosaic browser in 1993, Ross
immediately saw the travel marketing potential of the internet and drove
efforts that led to the launch of the pioneering and multi-award winning
australia.com destination marketing site.
Ross has lived and worked in Sydney, London, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore
and has traveled extensively. He enjoys getting off the beaten track
with a backpack but also indulging in luxury travel of all descriptions.
Gary Lipkowitz
Director of Finance
Gary joined Bezurk in 2006, with over 12 years of media experience earned in the US and Asia.
Most recently, he was Associate Director for Mediacorp Raintree Pictures, Singapore's feature film studio, concentrating on film financing and international sales. Prior to Raintree, he served as a strategy consultant with Yahoo! Southeast Asia, advising senior management on a variety of strategic, operational and financial issues.
Before moving to Asia, Gary was an award-winning corporate television writer/producer in Chicago and Austin. He also wrote, produced and directed the English-language adaptations of over 20 anime franchises for ADV Films, including both "fan titles" such as City Hunter, Legend of Crystania and Queen Emeraldas, and "crossover titles" such as Tekken and Sonic the Hedgehog.
He holds a BA in Economics & Psychology (magna cum laude) from New York University, an MFA in Radio/TV/Film from Northwestern University, and an MBA (with distinction) from INSEAD. He is an avid beach volleyball player, has a growing interest in Balinese art and is frantically trying to get his CounterStrike skills up to the level of the Bezurk development team.
Steven Gong
Manager, Strategy
With several years of management consulting experience, Steven joined Bezurk in 2006. As a management consultant Steven worked on various strategic projects including growth strategy development, cost reduction and process redesign for clients in Australia, South Korea and Malaysia. He advised leading corporations across multiple sectors including consumer products, financial services, agrichemicals and public services. With a very strong passion to work in the online space, Steven made the jump from management consulting to internet start-up.
Steven holds a BSc (Information Systems) from the University of New South Wales and continues to expand his education through reading the valuable insights on the bottom of Snapple bottle caps.
With a fascination for anything ending with a dot-com, Steven enjoys observing the industry and new business models (he can't let go of his consulting background). He also enjoys traveling and discovering new cities, cultures and hotels.
Gary Theis
Technical Director
Our ex-"Only Yank and/or Gary on the team", Gary Theis has over 15 years experience in software development and internet consulting. He has worked in a variety of environments ranging from the Bangor nuclear submarine base in Washington to Los Alamos National Labs to Cape Canaveral Florida. Most recently, he has worked for a variety of technical startups in Asia including Icon MediaLab, Spike, and now Bezurk.
Having worked in Japan and Singapore for the last 7 years, he brings a background in internationalization and web development to Bezurk's internet presence, and a keen understanding of the rigors of development under the resource and time constraints of the usual process of starting up on the internet.
A rabid computer gamer, he logs far more hours than his wife can stand clobbering orcs online, but occasionally surfaces to spend time with his two children (with the long term goal of teaching them to farm gold for his nefarious exploits, of course). Gary also fancies himself a adequate badminton player, but can't be bothered to fetch anything beyond his reach and so is relegated to the less-flashy doubles game.
Cheah Chu Yeow
Software Architect
A web developer who has found his home with Ruby, Chu Yeow is also the author of Firefox Secrets (yes, a book about Mozilla Firefox, the Web browser).
Most recently employed as your run-of-the-mill monkey coder over at Singapore Computer Systems, Chu Yeow also spent a short stint as Web Developer/Architect over at muvee Technologies, where he handled the company's Web intiatives and performed Webmaster-ly duties.
Chu Yeow also has a huge (some might say, "unhealthy") obsession for anime and animated shows like Lucky ☆ Star, Ergo Proxy, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Last EXILE, Futurama, and Family Guy. Sometimes when he's bored, he contributes patches to the Open Source Ruby on Rails project (Ed: Chu Yeow needs to get a life). He also is obsessed with lolcats and is rather disappointed that he couldn't write this profile in lolcats.
He keeps a blog at http://blog.codefront.net/ where he writes about Rails, Firefox and Anime (no surprises there).