The State of Innovation Summit 2009

Cory Ondrejka is EMI Music’s Executive Vice President, Digital Marketing.  In this role, which he assumed in March 2009, Ondrejka is advancing the company’s digital marketing capabilities, developing new consumer and market insight resources, and leading EMI’s experimentation with new digital marketing and product models in order to provide the best service to its artists and their fans. 

Ondrejka was formerly EMI’s Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy.  Since joining the company in 2008 from Second Life developer Linden Lab, he has helped create and implement a new digital strategy including building a world-class digital engineering team and infrastructure in San Francisco, instituting modern, agile software development practices and tools and helping to transform the company’s approach to analytics.

Prior to EMI, Ondrejka was the co-founder of Linden Lab, where he led the development of the virtual world Second Life. In addition to developing the core code and building the company from 4 to 250 people, Ondrejka drove multiple initiatives that generated enormous value from user participation, creation, and collaboration. The ecosystems he helped create led directly to the success of Second Life, as well as the ongoing use of Second Life as a platform for music, education, and business. Before Linden Lab, Ondrejka travelled an eclectic path from the U.S. Naval Academy and nuclear power to defense contracting and video game development.

More recently, he has served as a visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, where he taught a course on online communities and coordinated the MacArthur grant driving research for the Public Diplomacy and Network Culture Project.
Ondrejka received a B.S. in Weapons and Systems Engineering and Computer Science from the United States Naval Academy.