Executive Leadership
Jon Dwyer
Chief Executive Officer
Jon Dwyer is Chairman & CEO of Gamelancer Media Corp, having previously served as Chairman, CEO and co-founder of Wondr Gaming until the Gamelancer acquisition. Jon started in the gaming industry as Senior Vice-President of Aquilini Gameco and subsequently Senior Vice-President and Head of Sales & Partnerships at Enthusiast Gaming, before leaving to co-found Wondr Gaming.
Prior to entering the gaming industry Jon was CEO of Aereus Technologies, of which he is still a director. Jon was also founder & CEO of Flax Energy Corporation, and currently sits on the board of LayUp Foundation and the Boost Fundraising Advisory Board.
Jon is an active contributor to AM640 and has been published in the Forbes, Globe and Mail, National Post, Financial Times, Toronto Star, CBC, and Toronto Sun amongst other publications.
Mike Cotton
President & Chief Operating Officer
Mike Cotton is President & Chief Operating Officer of Gamelancer Media Corp, having previously served as President & COO, and co-founder of Wondr Gaming until the Gamelancer acquisition. Mike was previously Founder & CEO of Rumble Gaming, a global esports and gaming talent agency, and former Managing Director, Sports & Media at Ryerson Futures, a venture capital accelerator that focused on investments in early-stage technology companies. Mike also has experience consulting and creating player evaluation and analytics reports for multiple National Hockey League hockey operations departments, and has worked for SportsNet New York and Major League Soccer. Before entering the entertainment industry, Mike was a policy analyst and economist for former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Max Desmarais
Chief Business Officer
Max Desmarais, is the Founder and CEO of 514 Creative, which specializes in helping businesses, brands, and people reach new and existing clients through digital media.
More recently, Max took a position at Gamelancer as Chief Business Officer, where he will focus on growing Gamelancer’s media business. Max's relationships with corporate partners, brands, athletes, and musicians will help populate these marketplaces with exciting, unique, and exclusive products for their fans.
While he was forming 514 Creative, Max was also the Co-Founder and President of ScaleLab Network, a YouTube multi-platform network with offices in Los Angeles and Sao Paulo, Brazil. ScaleLab encompasses 1,750 YouTube channels, 400 million subscribers, and garners over 3 billion views per month. Subsidiaries include brand marketing firm DisruptivAgency, Spanish/Portuguese arm ScaleLab Mundo, and regional divisions in the U.K., Russia, Germany, Lithuania, and the Netherlands, brings a wealth of digital advertising, development and social media experience to the company.
Before forming ScaleLab, Mr. Desmarais was Vice President of New Media at Principal Media, a global TV/online entertainment company based in London and Beverly Hills. At Principal Media, Mr. Desmarais oversaw the development of the company’s slate of digital programming, as well as devising and implementing their social media strategy.
Prior to joining Principal Media, Mr. Desmarais spearheaded the global social media strategy of Guess, Inc., and expanded the fashion powerhouse’s social footprint from two to seventy-eight countries. He was also an account executive at Publicis Group, where he created digital marketing campaigns for brands such as Home Depot, Labatt Brewing Company, and KIA. Fluent in French, Mr. Desmarais received a B.A. in Philosophy at the University of Ottawa, and a Masters Degree in Marketing at UCLA. He currently resides in Los Angeles, California.
Pooja Sharma
Chief Financial Officer
Ms. Sharma is a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) who brings nearly a decade of experience as an executive in a wide range of finance and business functions within various industries, including Financial Controller and Director of Finance. Most recently serving as Director of Finance and HR at Ukko Agro Inc, a SaaS company. Sharma began her career at Muir Tapes & Adhesives, where she spent more than 7 years in a variety of roles of increasing responsibility. Along with maximizing profitability, operational efficiencies, and enterprise value, she specializes in executing overall financial strategy, building strong financial foundations for scalability, and driving profitable growth. Sharma also has extensive board and executive committee experience.
Razvan Romanescu
Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer
Raz is Serial entrepreneur with 12+ years experience building community driven companies.
Darren Lopes
Co-founder & Chief Product Officer
Darren Lopes is an entrepreneur and internet being who has become a social media expert.
Active roles include Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at Gamelancer Media Corp and Co-founder & Co-CEO at 10PM Curfew, these companies generate more than 2.5 billion monthly video views with a combined total of over 65 million followers. These are the largest and fastest-growing networks in both Gaming and Gen-Z Lifestyle on social media. Darren is truly a battle-tested digital growth and strategy expert who’s been operating in the social media space since its inception.
Active roles include Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at Gamelancer Media Corp and Co-founder & Co-CEO at 10PM Curfew, these companies generate more than 2.5 billion monthly video views with a combined total of over 65 million followers. These are the largest and fastest-growing networks in both Gaming and Gen-Z Lifestyle on social media. Darren is truly a battle-tested digital growth and strategy expert who’s been operating in the social media space since its inception.
Zak Longo
Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer
Zak Longo is Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer of Gamelancer Media Corp. Previously Zak was a director/producer on films, music videos, and TV series for MTV. Zak took his talents to digital media launching Panda Propaganda a production company that has reached billions of viewers with original content. Zak founded Sugo Sunday Inc, one of the top global partners on Snap’s Discover platform with over 20 channels and 10+ million followers. He also co-founded Travly Inc (@Travel on Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok) the largest and fastest growing cross-platform travel media brand.
Tommy Callaway
Chief Technology Officer
Tommy is the Chief Technology Officer at Gamelancer Media Corp. Tommy has been a systems architect and web developer for over a decade with a primary focus on building horizontally scalable, cost-effective applications. He has personally built and automated hundreds of custom data crawlers, scrapers, queues, APIs, and content management systems. He's also developed a lightweight MVC framework that is currently used to run several enterprise applications in both publicly traded and private markets. More recently, he designed and developed a highly cost effective ETL pipeline for real time event aggregation with a low-cost serverless architecture, along with a visual interface to interact with and analyze that data in real time. Tommy also became interested in filmmaking a few years ago to experiment with video production on YouTube as a hobby, and has amassed over 45k followers on his topic.
Directors
Samuel Banks
Director
Samuel Banks is a seasoned sports professional currently responsible for partner management and ticket operations as part of the Global Partnerships & Media group at a pro sports league. Prior to his current role, he was part of the league's Basketball Operations group, where he created models to inform decisions on collective bargaining, free agency, and player discipline.
Before joining the league, Sam worked in NBC Sports' promotions department, as well as with the broadcasting team at Major League Soccer. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Sport Management from St. John's University, a Master's in Sports Business from NYU, as well as a Master's in Negotiation & Conflict Resolution from Columbia University.
Paul Coffey
Director
A retired Canadian NHL player, Paul's NHL career spanned from 1980-2001. Paul holds an impressive 22 NHL records. Along with his four Stanley Cup Championships, Paul has been honored as one of the 100 Greatest NHL Players of all time.
Today, Paul has a number of business interests as an investor and partner in a Kia dealership in Bolton, Ontario, a partner in Access Storage (a storage business), a car wash business and is a founding partner of E360. Paul is a well-connected and influential business partner. He is Special Advisor to Daryl Katz and the Edmonton Oilers.
Storm Boswick
Director
Storm Boswick is an experienced Founder, Partner, Portfolio Manager(PM), and Sr Managing Director(MD) in Asset Mgt & Inv Banking. Also a Venture Capitalist, Long/Short PM, and skilled Investor & Advisor in Public & Private Equity and Public & Private Debt. As Strategic Advisor, mandates include Governance & Corporate Advisory, Public-Private Partnerships, M&A, Capital Formation & Intro, and Commercial Intro. Strong BusDev professional, industry/investment conf presenter, panelist, media contributor, and lecturer.
Cyril Leeder, FCPA, FCA, ICD.D
Director
Cyril is the CEO of Ottawa’s largest automotive retailer – Myers Automotive Group with 15 dealerships and 3 collision centres operating exclusively in the Ottawa area.
Previously, Cyril was one of the original founders of the Ottawa Senators Hockey Club and was with the team for 27 years in various capacities including more than 15 years as COO and President.
In 2017, Mayor Jim Watson bestowed onto Cyril the Order of Ottawa and Cyril was named Ottawa Board of Trade’s Business-Person-of-the-Year in 2008. Cyril has also been inducted into the Ottawa and Brockville Sports Hall of Fames.
Cyril is Director of a number of entities including Gamelancer Media, Hydro Ottawa, Ottawa Community Foundation and the Ontario Sport Network.
Rob Segal
Director
Rob Segal has been a leading North American marketing and communications specialist for over 25 years. During this time he has worked with some of the World's largest and most respected brands.
- Founded Segal Communications, in 1995.
- In 1996 Segal launched the original PlayStation and would go on to oversee and execute PlayStation's Canadian marketing for the next 12 years
- Segal Communications grew into one of Canada's largest promotional & licensing agencies. Clients included: Sony, Facebook, Ford, Marvel, HP, Dreamworks, TD, Unilever (Axe, Degree, Becel, Lipton’s & Vaseline), Virgin Mobile, Party Poker, 20th Century Fox, Poker Stars, and many more.
- Segal Communications was acquired in 2000 by Interpublic.
- In 2006 Segal partnered with Facebook, opening Facebook's first office outside Palo Alto. Segal exclusively represented Facebook sales efforts in Canada until the end of 2009.
- Segal left the agency at the end of 2009 invested in and later became CEO of WorldGaming. WorldGaming was an early pioneer in Esports. WorldGaming was acquired by Cineplex in September 2015.
- In February 2020, Segal joined Authentic Brands Group as President of Business Development. Authentic Brands Group (ABG) is a brand development, marketing, and entertainment company, which owns a portfolio of global media, entertainment, and lifestyle brands.