Loren Bendele

Loren has spent the majority of his career leading teams to build user generated content technology platforms that effectively harness the “wisdom of the crowd.” He is the previous CEO and co-founder of Savings.com (acquired by Valpak) where users share and vote on deals, discounts and coupon codes. Savings.com also built Favado, a grocery community and mobile app to allow the community to find and vote on sales and coupons for local grocery stores. Loren has also been a supporter of K-12 public education and political reform. It was his passion for both of these areas (user generated content and education/political reform) that inspired the idea for Gell. He believes that civil discourse is a critical pillar of effective societies and that it is a natural evolution for technology to enable broad-scale and diverse civil discourse on important issues and elections to ultimately help society make better decisions. Earlier in his career he has worked as a strategy consultant with The Boston Consulting Group and as a chemical engineer with Dow Chemical. Politically he is an independent with a track record of voting for republicans, democrats and independents.

“The biggest problems and opportunities in society span across geographic and political boundaries. Environmental stewardship, managing pandemics, handling job displacements due to AI, reducing income disparities and other global challenges are not contained within one country. We must learn to collaborate and work together to make the best decisions; transparent civil discourse and healthy engagement will be required for society to build consensus and work together to manage our future.”