About Sympathy Tree
Louise Zweben, CEO and Monte Zweben, Chairman
Louise first had the idea for SympathyTree.com from her personal experiences in dealing with the death of a close family friend. Like Louise and Monte, many people have friends and family spread far and wide, across the US and throughout the world. Notifying them about the death of a family/close friend and the schedule/location of related services can be stressful and difficult. However, with the help of other family and friends and the internet, the word can be spread quickly and virally around the world in minutes. Louise wanted to use the internet to help make this process easier.
After further thought, Louise and Monte realized that the internet can be so much more than just an efficient means to notify people of a death and the logistics of memorial services. It can be an important part of the ongoing grieving and healing process. When people gather at a funeral or a memorial service, they see friends and relatives they have not seen in a while. Together they pay tribute, share stories and memories, and comfort one another. It’s often a very cathartic and reflective experience. Louise and Monte realized that this experience could be extended beyond the funeral events by creating a virtual place online where people can come together to grieve, heal, and comfort each other for generations to come. Thus the birth of SympathyTree.com, a place where children, grandchildren and other friends and family can visit anytime from anywhere in the world to converse, tell stories, enrich those stories with photos and videos, and allow others to add their own thoughts and photos to stories.
Louise and Monte’s vision is for SympathyTree to become a site where people come to celebrate the lives of those they have recently lost and share their stories of love and loss, sadness and joy, and in the process, provide comfort to each other during this difficult time. They see SympathyTree as the place where future generations can treasure those stories and "get to know" their grandparents and great grandparents. Finally, they invision it to be a site through which immediately family members of the deceased can notify their friends and family privately about the services and assist them during the most stressful time of their lives.
Louise and Monte Zweben are serial entrepreneurs with successful businesses spanning a wide range of areas including Technology and Real Estate. Louise most recently designed and developed multiple residential real-estate projects in San Francisco and Hawaii after a successful career in High Technology. She culminated her high tech career as Director of Operations for Ridge Technologies, a storage technology company sold to Adaptec. Prior to that she held several management positions at Sun Microsystems including Senior Manager of Order Operations and Logistics. Prior to Sun, Louise held various engineering positions at companies such as Motorola, Scotland and Shinetsu-Hanotai Europe. Louise holds a B.Sc (Honors) in Physics from Glasgow University, Scotland.
Monte is the Chairman, of SeeSaw Networks, a new media company offering the most extensive network of digital out-of-home media. Prior to SeeSaw, Monte was the founder and CEO of Blue Martini Software - the leader in multi-channel systems for retailers. Blue Martini revolutionized a new approach to direct response marketing and is now a part of Escalate Retail, a leading provider of software solutions foe the retail industry. Monte also was the Chairman & CEO of Red Pepper Software, a leading Supply Chain Optimization company which merged with PeopleSoft. Monte’s early career was spent with the NASA Ames Research Center as the Deputy Branch Chief of the Artificial Intelligence Branch, where he won the prestigious Space Act Award for his work on the Space Shuttle program. Monte is the co-author of Intelligent Scheduling and has published articles in the Harvard Business Review and various computer science journals and conference proceedings. He serves on the Dean’s Advisory Board for Carnegie-Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science, and Business from Carnegie-Mellon, and an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford.