About Us

Jeff Denson, Founder and President

After many successful years as a professional farrier, Jeff realized that there were many ways a farrier's relationship with their customers had incredible value. Jeff is the visionary behind a suite of services that farriers can offer to their customers. He drives the services that Farriers United offers.

In addition to being a top notch farrier, Jeff has proven himself as a successful salesman when an injury kept him from shoeing horses for a while.

Ed Fadel, Chief Operations Officer

Ed is an experienced and successful entrepreneur and has been working exclusively in start-up organizations for his entire career. In 1987, Fadel co-founded his third company, CD Superstore, and served as President and COO. The company grew to over $35 million in sales with over 300 employees. In 1994, CD Superstore was sold to Borders Group, which was at the time, a subsidiary of Kmart, and today, the $2 billion parent company of Waldenbooks and Borders Books. Ed operated the newly acquired company as one of three divisions of Borders Group. During that time the management of Borders Group prepared for and took the company public.

More recently, Ed co-founded and has worked as the Sr. Vice President of Business Development and Marketing at Bright View Technologies, Inc.

Supplementing his operational experience, Ed has also spent considerable time as a private equity investor. In this capacity, he has searched for and analyzed early-stage companies, structured and negotiated investments in these companies, and assisted various companies as an advisor or director. Additionally, Ed founded and managed Fusion Ventures, a seed stage venture fund and business accelerator. Ed holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Duke University.

Ken Auer, Chief Technology Officer

Ken Auer has been in and around the business of building and maintaining custom software development solutions since the early 80s. Though he was formally trained in Computer Science at the prestigious engineering school of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and began graduate studies at Southern Florida University, he was introduced to object-oriented programming and other technologies in the mid-80s and quickly became a leader in its commercial application. His first large effort was as a leader on a team that designed and implemented a revolutionary approach to Network Management Systems before GUIs were commonplace. Since then, he has led projects in both technical and management roles in a large number of domains including order management, e-commerce, health informatics, semiconductor manufacturing, configuration management, and many more.

After stints with IBM and Paradyne, Mr. Auer became the fourth employee of Knowledge Systems Corporation in 1988 and was key player in its success in both technical and management roles, making the Inc. 500 for five years in a row with revenues of over $10M when he left to form RoleModel Software, Inc. in 1997. Mr. Auer built RoleModel Software to be a small high performance software development team, specializing in the application of agile software development to help entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs succeed in taking their fledgling concepts and turn them into working IT solutions that both quickly serve their business needs and are unusually adaptable to evolve with the needs of the business. In the process he has worked with a variety of startups to provide them with not only working IT solutions, but also business consulting to help them better make sure the IT solutions are appropriate to the markets they aim to serve.

In addition to the multitude of working IT Solutions he has produced, Mr. Auer has had many successful proteges whom he has both directly trained through apprenticeship or had a role in training through seminars and published works including the highly acclaimed "Extreme Programming Applied" published by Addison-Wesley in 2001. He is often sought after to share his wisdom gained in a variety of technical, business, and educational venues, recently being asked to deliver the opening keynote address at the Software Craftsmanship of North America's 1st annual conference in 2009.