Fadi Chehadé

Chehadé was born in Beirut, Lebanon, to Egyptian parents. In 1985, he received his bachelor's degree in computer science from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. The following year he completed his master's degree in engineering management at Stanford University. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1986.

Chehadé founded Nett Information Products (aka Connectica) in 1987, a company to create and develop an Internet-based content management and sharing solution. Nett was acquired by Ingram Micro and Chehadé became their vice president in charge of customer information services.

In 1997, while at Ingram Micro, Anthony Mesaros was managing the development of an eCommerce website for Ingram Micro and discovered that there was no standard for product descriptions and started the internal Ingram Micro project called Rosetta Stone to establish such standards in the technology industry. Later that year after sitting down with Mesaros to review the project, Chehadé conceived of expanding on that project as a stand-alone not-for-profit organization that would coordinate and develop standards for Business-to-business (B2B) communications. He successfully convinced businesses, including Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, SAP, Nokia and Oracle Corporation, to back the program and the result was RosettaNet where he became its first CEO.

In 1999, Chehadé founded Viacore Inc., a B2B services provider, which was acquired by IBM in 2006. At which time he became IBM's vice president for global business development followed by general manager of their global technology services for Middle East/North Africa region. He then took over as CEO of CoreObjects Software, Inc., a developer of new product management software for businesses. CoreObjects was acquired in 2010 by Symphony Services.

For the next two years Chehadé was CEO of Vocado LLC, a provider of cloud-based software for educational institutions to manage administrative and student services.