William Herp

William Herp is the President, CEO, and Co-Founder of Linear Air. He has a background in consumer marketing and used this to co-found e-Dialog, a 500 person online marketing company now owned by GSI Commerce (Nasdaq: GSIC), with clients including Dell, British Airways, Avis, and CheapTickets. He served as Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Geerlings & Wade. He is also a member of the board of directors of Junior Achievement of Eastern Massachusetts and holds an airline transport pilot certificate.
History
Early life and education
Born in Louisville, Kentucky,
Career
After obtaining his degree, Herp started a cell phone company that he sold to Shared Technologies Fairchild just a year and a half after creating it. Next, he became a wine wholesaler, which led to him being hired, from 1993 to 1995, as vice president and Chief Financial Officer for the wine distributor Geerlings & Wade.
After founding several businesses, Herp obtained a pilot's license in 1996, along with creating the business e-Dialog in the same year with his business partner Andy Estes. By 2003, he felt that e-Dialog could run more independently from him, giving him time to found Linear Air in Concord, Massachusetts. This resulted in his eventually selling e-Dialog to Ebay to work on his other projects.
After working on a business model with Michael Goulian, Herp obtained an FAA Part 135 Air Carrier Certification for the company and officially began his business in August of 2004. It began by using five Cessna Caravans to make air taxi flights across North America. In 2007, a Eclipse 500 was added and plans were made to obtain around 30 more very light jets over the next few years. This was done around a leasing plan for investors, where the planes would be bought by the investors and leased to Linear Air, the company giving them both a monthly payment for leasing the planes and allowing the investors to list the plane ownership as a tax benefit due to the depreciation from use.
Herp later expanded the company's connections to a number of Cirrus pilots in the northeastern United States and set up a system of short point-to-point flights for customers. In 2015, he began seeking investors for around $2 million in order to expand the point-to-point system with 1000 other pilots. The ultimate plan is to make a nationwide charter plane service titled the Linear Connect Digital Marketplace that would allow point-to-point flights to be booked anywhere in the United States.
Accolades
Herp won the 2016 Internet Advertising Competition Award for Outstanding Achievement in Internet Advertising as a part of the Internet Advertising Competition for his company Linear Air.
Personal life
Herp performs each summer with the touring show, Herpapalooza, along with his brothers, Cooper and Eli, and their respective grunge, classical, reggae bands. He is married to his wife Carolyn and has two daughters.<ref name="BJT"/>

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