Cesar Brea is the founder and managing partner of Force Five Partners, LLC, a marketing analytics consulting firm serving leading brands in multiple industries, including retail, media, financial services, technology, education, and health care. Cesar has more than 25 years as a line executive, advisor, and entrepreneur across nearly two dozen industries.
Prior to starting Force Five Partners in 2008, Cesar served in Monitor Group’s Marketspace unit (digital media and marketing advisory practice) as Global Practice Leader from 2005-2008. Before joining Marketspace, Cesar was founder and managing partner of ESM Partners, which focused on helping large organizations define and launch Web-based, information-intensive businesses. During this time Cesar also acted as CEO of Contact Networks, a social networking software startup, helping it to raise venture funding and win customers before its successful acquisition by Thomson Financial.
Formerly, Cesar was Senior Vice President for Sales and Marketing at Razorfish, a publicly-traded interactive agency and systems integrator, through its acquisition by SBI and Company in 2003. Prior to Razorfish, Cesar was Vice President for Marketing and Business Development at ArsDigita Corporation, an open-source web application software firm focused on online communities. He helped the firm grow profitably from $5M to $20M in less than two years, obtain $40M in venture funding from Greylock Ventures and General Atlantic Partners, and subsequently sell the firm to Red Hat Corporation in 2002. Earlier, he was a management consultant at Bain & Company, where he advised clients in high-technology consumer products, and financial services sectors. Cesar began his career as a banker with J.P. Morgan in New York.
Cesar holds an MBA from Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School, where he was named an Edward Tuck Scholar, and received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College.
He is a frequent writer and speaker. He published his first book, Pragmalytics: Practical Approaches to Marketing Analytics in the Digital Age, in 2013. His articles have appeared in Forbes.com, CMO.com, The Journal of Business Strategy, Line 56, and Web Services Journal, and he has presented talks at Enterprise 2.0, “Carlson On Metrics”, The American Marketing Association, The Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (where he also serves as a judge in the MITX annual awards competition), KM Cluster, The Public Relations Society of America, IBM Research’s Center for Social Software, and the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institut’s International Retail Conference (Switzerland). Cesar has also been a guest lecturer in an advanced computer science course at MIT, and he co-founded and is a former director of the .LRN Consortium, which promotes the development and adoption of the world’s most popular, enterprise-class, open-source e-learning platform.
Cesar enjoys sailing with his family on Nantucket Sound.