About Us

Management Team

Chris Gross - President

Mr. Gross is a talented architect and developer with over 10 years experience leading the creation of numerous award winning software products. Chris has a knack for dissecting a customer’s requirements to produce beautiful and engaging software that is, most importantly, also easy to use. Prior to founding Element River, Chris spent 4 years at IBM managing UI Platforms & Frameworks for the Infosphere Tools suite of products. Also while at IBM, he helped influence IBM’s user interface strategy through his participation in its UI Strategy Working Group. Before IBM, Chris was the Senior Development Manager at Chesapeake System Solutions, a leading provider of account reconciliation and compliance products. At Chesapeake, he shepherded their multiple product lines through multiple generations of technology.

In addition to his corporate responsibilities, Chris has played a significant role in the open source community. His expertise with Eclipse SWT and the Eclipse RCP led him to create the Eclipse Nebula project. As the founder and project lead of Nebula, Chris ushered in a new era of custom componentry for Eclipse including his well known Grid widget. Today Chris provides the same level of passion and expertise to Adobe’s Flash/Flex platform.

Bill Kotraba – Marketing & Sales Advisor

Mr. Kotraba provides his 15 years of sales, marketing and entrepreneurial experience to ElementRiver. He has worked with a number of emerging software companies. His latest startup was LogiXML an emerging business intelligence software provider, where he was the founding sales and marketing leader. Bill helped double sales for 5 straight years and obtain two rounds of funding from DC based VC funds. Bill also helped lead a number of other technology start-ups like Avilar, Rubicon Technologies, and Sunset Learning. He has a BS in marketing from the University of Baltimore and a MS in marketing from Johns Hopkins University.