Our Team
WhoElse is currently staffing up. Here is a short bio on our founder.
Lawrence Axil Comras
President/Founder
Lawrence “Axil” Comras is an entrepreneur, software designer, environmentalist, socially engaged Buddhist, writer and public speaker. Axil’s work focuses on how technology can facilitate a spiritual transformation and awakening of the human species. Over the last decade, Axil successfully built, ran, and recently sold a well-respected eco-company, Greenhome.com. His latest venture, announced at SXSW Interactive 2012, is a co-sharing mobile application called WhoElse. Based in Unawatuna, Sri Lanka and San Francisco, California, Axil spends much of his time on the road, mostly in Southeast Asia, and has a truly global perspective that is reflected in his work as a visionary entrepreneur. To find out more about Axil’s take on the world, visit his blog Axil.Asia.
Axil was CEO of Greenhome.com from 1999 until it was purchased by Jane Capital in 2010. Greenhome.com was the first green consumer company featured on major TV networks, helping increase awareness about sustainability practices for home consumers. Greenhome.com created and was exclusively featured in the first segment aired on “going green” for NBC’s Today Show. Greenhome.com is the example used for “greening” in Wikipedia, has come up #1 on Google for “Green Products” and “Environmental Products” since 2002, and remains the only green e-commerce site ever nominated for a Webby Award. In addition, it is the only business ever endorsed by the Earth Charter.
As a highly sought-after conference and events speaker who talks on changing people’s consciousness and greening, Axil has addressed U.S. and international audiences at several prominent institutions and conferences, including the University of California’s cross-campus Education for Sustainable Living Program, LOHAS, Go Green Expo and Solfest. Axil has lectured on technology at MIT, and has written articles on the intersection of technology and ecology for the Los Angeles Times and Bay Citizen.
Prior to founding Greenhome.com, Axil served in the mid-1990s as software consultant and special advisor to three Paul Allen companies – Interval Research Corporation, Storyopolis, and Vulcan Ventures. During the early 1990s, Axil was Product Manager for Broderbund Software, responsible for helping to create some of the most successful and award-winning consumer software of the ’90s, including the Williams Sonoma Guide to Good Cooking, and the Kid Pix and Print Shop family of products. Axil helped develop and worked closely with Apple Computer to productize QuickTime, which was the first digital video program for the consumer market.
From 1988 to 1990, Axil was Director of Eyes on Earth and then The GAIA Project. Eyes on Earth developed and marketed the GeoSphere, the first cloud-free model and photograph of the Earth from space – an image featured on the cover of Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance. GAIA, which stands for Globally Aware Information Architecture, introduced a new framework for using visualization of three-dimensional Earth phenomena to encourage people to take environmental action.
Axil began his technology career in the late 1980s, when he was selected to lead a development team at Philips to create the first multimedia CD-ROM for the consumer market, Tell Me Why? He has his B.A. in Philosophy from Wesleyan University.
Read content by and about Axil at the following sites:
