Tastevin: iPad beverage list software. Re-invent your beverage sales.

Our Team

John Jordan

Chairman of the Board

John Jordan is co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Labrador. An avid pilot, during college he continued to feed his passion for flying and received his Airline Transport Pilot License at age 23 (minimum age requirement). John is a graduate of Occidental College in Los Angeles and holds a JD from Empire College School of Law. While studying law, John also attended graduate school and received a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of San Francisco. A family tradition of naval military service also led John to join the U.S. Navy Reserve in his 20s, where he rose to the rank of Commander. After passing the California Bar Examination in December 2002, John joined the Santa Rosa-based law firm where he’d worked as a clerk in college, then opened his own private firm in Sonoma County in 2004. John enjoys flying his Piper Cub and fishing for bass on Jordan lake. He also serves as a professor at the Empire College School of Law, and speaks German and Russian. He shares his hillside home with Labradors he adopted from a local shelter.

Josh Hermsmeyer

CEO

Josh Hermsmeyer is co-founder and CEO of Labrador. With 10 years in the wine industry on the grower and supplier side, Josh’s passion lies at the intersection of wine and technology. Josh has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Wine & Spirits, Wines and Vines, The Press Democrat, North Bay Biz and Fast Company Now. He has given talks on social media and marketing at UC Davis, Sonoma State University, The Wine Industry Technology Symposium, The Mendocino Winegrape Commission, and Women for Wine Sense. Josh has also written for Vineyard & Winery Management, Wines and Vines and co-authored a chapter on direct-to-consumer marketing and Wine 2.0 for Professor Liz Thach’s Wine: A Global Business, the authoritative academic text on the wine industry. He served on the Sonoma County Wine Library Associates Board of Directors from 2007-2008, and was elected President for the 2008 year. Josh was trained at UC Davis, where he studied Economics and Winemaking. He lives at and manages Rebecca’s Vineyard, a 17 acre pinot noir vineyard in the Russian River Valley.

Nabeel Al-Shamma

VP Engineering

Nabeel Al-Shamma heads up engineering & operations at Labrador OmniMedia and owns a small vineyard in Sonoma County. Previously, he held a wide variety of roles at Adobe Systems, the company known for world-changing products like Photoshop and Acrobat. He began his nineteen years tenure working as senior software developer and architect on Adobe Acrobat and PDF. On the management front he was senior director of the Adobe core technology group, promoting and developing shared technologies for graphics, XML, PDF, scripting and more across all Adobe products. More recently he worked on hosted services and rich text typography & layout for the web. Before Adobe, he worked at large companies such as Xerox, and startups such as Surface Science Instruments and Prometrix. He got his start in industry at Bechtel Corporation in San Francisco designing slurry pipelines. Nabeel has a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley.

Mike Gunderloy

Lead Developer

Mike Gunderloy is the Lead Developer for Labrador OmniMedia and a top contributor and recognized expert in Ruby on Rails. With over 35 years experience in software development, he is the author of more than fifty books and has contributed to numerous open source projects, software magazines, and web sites. He has been lead developer and principal architect for a number of e-commerce and vertical market web sites and has also contributed code to packaged consumer software from Microsoft and other vendors. He is also one of the founders of the RailsBridge initiative to help mentor and support new developers. Mike has a BS in Industrial Engineering from Northeastern and an MS in Science & Technology Studies from RPI. When not writing software, he's active in Scouting and homeschools his four children in the Evansville, Indiana area.

Yew-Wei Tan

Mobile Developer

Yew-wei Tan is responsible for leading Labrador's charge in the burgeoning Mobile App space. Having worked with various frameworks and environments, ranging from the battle-tested server-side world of Erlang/OTP, to the finicky client-side domain of HTML and Javascript, he now finds himself at the intersection of those domains. He is based out of Melbourne, Australia, and has yet to find a wine that can best a good Aussie red.

Our Team

Josh Hermsmeyer

President

Josh Hermsmeyer is co-founder and President of Rottweiler. With 10 years in the wine industry on the grower and supplier side, Josh’s passion lies at the intersection of wine and technology. Josh has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Wine & Spirits, Wines and Vines, The Press Democrat, North Bay Biz and Fast Company Now. He has given talks on social media and marketing at UC Davis, Sonoma State University, The Wine Industry Technology Symposium, The Mendocino Winegrape Commission, and Women for Wine Sense. Josh has also written for Vineyard & Winery Management, Wines and Vines and co-authored a chapter on direct-to-consumer marketing and Wine 2.0 for Professor Liz Thach’s Wine: A Global Business, the authoritative academic text on the wine industry. He served on the Sonoma County Wine Library Associates Board of Directors from 2007-2008, and was elected President for the 2008 year. Josh was trained at UC Davis, where he studied Economics and Winemaking. He lives at and manages Rebecca’s Vineyard, a 17 acre pinot noir vineyard in the Russian River Valley.

Ken Lippe

Partner

Ken Lippe is co-founder and partner of Rottweiler. Ken has over 15 years experience in the software and high technology industries. Specializing in performing risk management and revenue assurance services, his primary focus has been third party compliance reviews on behalf of global technology companies. Additionally, Ken has extensive experience evaluating various business processes by validating their effectiveness and efficiency, and identifying improvement opportunities. He is currently CFO of Inviso Corporation, a company he co-founded, and has worked in the legal department of Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, and in Audit & Enterprise Risk Services for Deloitte. Ken holds a B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Business Administration from Loyola Marymount University, and a J.D. from Santa Clara University. He is a member of the State Bar of California.

Nick Literski

VP Sales

Nick Literski joined the Rottweiler team in September of 2011 as Vice President of Sales. With an extensive background in the Food and Beverage Industry, Nick has worked for some of the most well known Hotels and Restaurants in the world including The American Club, Mandalay Bay and the Bellagio. Nick also has a deep knowledge of the Beverage Wholesaler and Suppler Chains with his time at Southern Wine and Spirits of America as a Division Manager and as a District Manager, Las Vegas, for Ste. Michelle Wines Estates. Nick is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America.

Wade Williams

Director of Customer Experience

Wade Williams has over 15 years experience in the Hospitality Industry working at some of the premiere venues on the California Coast, including Pebble Beach Company, Pacifica Del Mar and Rio Grill. He brings a solid foundation in on-premise operations and an eye for detail to Rottweiler. As Director of Customer Experience he is uniquely positioned to meet the needs of operators in this rapidly progressing field. His goal is to transition on-premise beverage sales into what will be the new industry standard, Tastevin.