Nathan Gwilliam
Nathan Gwilliam is an Latter-day Saint businessman, digital innovator, social marketer, and social entrepreneur. He created Adoption.com, which as CEO he grew to be the world's most-used adoption site. For his work with Adoption.com, Nathan has been inducted into the "Adoption Hall of Fame" by the Church of Jesus Christ's Family Services and Families Supporting Adoption. When the Church's Family Services ceased adoption services, Family Services paid for Church members to use Adoption.com Parent Profiles services during their transition year. Nathan has received the "Angels in Adoption" Award from the Congressional Coalition on Adoption (nominated by Senator Risch), and has been the keynote speaker at the National Adoption Conference.
Nathan worked for Clark Gilbert at Deseret Digital Media (DDM), which operates KSL, Deseret News, Deseret Book and other media properties. While at DDM Nathan developed and implemented the DDM social strategy, and grew DDM social follows from less than 100k when he started to more than 40 million in 18 months (now 110 million+). Nathan also created FamilyShare.com (including foreign language sites such as Familias.com in Spanish and Familia.com.br in Portuguese) for DDM. The FamilyShare sites reached 22 million page views/mo. within 18 months of launch (now 44 million+ unique visitors/month). Nathan also launched a YouTube channel for DDM in four languages which received 1.7 million video views in first two months
Nathan served a mission in the Brazil Recife South Mission. When he returned to his studies at Brigham Young University, he started his first business, Adoption.com, which won the BYU Business Plan Competition in 1997 and then the US West New Ventures Seed Money Competition. Nathan served for many years as one of the Founders of the BYU Center for Entrepreneurship and has received the "Best of the Decade" Award from the BYU Center for Entrepreneurship. Nathan dropped out of BYU after his junior year to run Adoption.com, but returned and finished his BYU undergraduate degree a decade later. He went on to complete a Masters in Business Administration from BYU.
He served as the president of the More Good Foundation and lead the initial creation of websites such as Christ.org, LDS.net, MormonChurch.com, ThomasMonson.com and ModernProphets.com.
Nathan has also spoken at TEDx, Internet conferences, adoption conferences, conferences of newspaper executives, and university classes and lecture series. Nathan is a popular speaker on topics such as digital innovation, social marketing, social innovation, passion-driven business, passion-driven marketing and passion-driven life. He served multiple semesters as the professor for the course: "Social Innovation: How to Change the World" at Brigham Young University–Idaho.
Nathan worked for Paul Allen as the Chief Revenue Officer for FamilyLink, where he increased revenue by $5 million in 12 months for the "We're Related" Facebook app. That app became a top-4 Facebook app with 90 million installs.
He worked for David Neeleman to help grow a new Brazilian airline named Azul. Nathan grew social follows of Azul from about 5k to more than 1.6 million in 12 months, and he built a popular Brazilian travel social network for Azul, and Azul became the fastest-growing airline ever.
Nathan has worked for Carlos Martins on several Brazilian digital ventures, including a language-learning platform Nathan created that has reached close to a million fans.
