Full Name
Steve Cotton
Job Title
Chief Executive Officer, President and Director
Company
Aqua Metals
Speaker Bio
Steve Cotton has served as President of the Company since May 2, 2018 and was promoted by the Board of Directors to President and CEO joining the Board as an Executive Director in January, 2019. Steve also served as Chief Commercial Officer of the Company from January 2015 to June, 2017. Previously, Steve co-founded Canara, Inc. (formerly Data Power Monitoring and IntelliBatt) in December 2001 and served as its Chief Executive Officer through the sale of the company to a private equity firm in June 2012, after which he served as Founder and Executive Chairman until April 2014. Canara (now part of CPG Data Center Innovators) is a global provider of stationary battery systems with integrated monitoring systems and cloud-based monitoring services to many of the largest data center operators. Prior to Canara, Steve led a team to commercialize Sendmail (the Worlds' most commonly used Internet email open source software) from free open source to a paid for commercial offering for Internet service providers and cloud offerings requiring mass email volume management including DoubleClick's standardization (acquired by Google). Steve's career began in the early days of voice messaging systems, including Octel Communications (through its $1.1B exit to Lucent Technologies in 1997 and now part of Avaya). From International Product Manager, to Product Manager for Multimedia, Steve then became the top market development person on a staff of 100+ for 2 years running while managing the AT&T Wireless account, then developing new wireless and local exchange carrier markets. His decision to convince AT&T Wireless (and ultimately other operators which followed) to offer voice messaging for free vs. charge, resulted in multi-million dollar sales of Octel equipment to each region. From April 2014 to January 2015 and June 2017 to April 2018, Steve managed his private investments.
