Shelly Blake-Plock is Principal and Managing Member of Blakeplock and Company. He has been President & CEO at Yet Analytics since co-founding the firm in 2014. And he's provided guidance to new ventures across the domains of artificial intelligence, mixed reality, new media, edtech, data standards, and consumer tech. Contact us.
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Our advisory services are based on our real-world experience starting up new ventures and in helping deep tech startups navigate complicated funding environments.
In 2025, Shelly served as an industry mentor in the National Science Foundation's I-Corps program. Especially in regard to the domain of deep tech, the program's goal is to scale down the time and risk inherent in the commercialization of fundamental discoveries in science and engineering — and to turn scientific potential into new commercial deep tech ventures.
From 2019 to 2024, he led Yet Analytics' efforts to win multiple Direct-to-Phase-II SBIR contracts through AFWERX and the Air Force Research Laboratory. This effort allowed for the commercialization of Yet's open source software portfolio — still the most widely installed suite of open source of its kind to be distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Shelly ran point on the initial funding of Yet — securing investment both from angel groups and from institutional venture capital funds. In 2016, the startup was named Baltimore Startup of the Year by Technical.ly, the prior year having been named winner of the Nielsen Data Visionary Award at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco.
Shelly's commitment to science and technology that is beneficial to humanity led him to become an officer of the Learning Technology Standards Committee at the IEEE — where he has served as the LTSC's treasurer since 2018 and has been active in the start up of several new initiatives including as charter chair of the IC Industry Consortium on Learning Engineering and as chair of the Technical Advisory Group on xAPI. He is currently chair and editor-in-chief of the TLA Study Group where he is leading the production of a book-length report on standards-based data architectures.
Shelly's new venture efforts began in earnest back in 2011 with the fundraising necessary to open Baltimore's Digital Harbor Foundation — still a home for digital equity in the city.
A BACKGROUND IN LEARNING
Shelly has been working at the intersection of learning and technology for nearly twenty-five years -- first as a classroom teacher in one of the earliest adopters of 1:1 computing in the US, then as the designer and instructor of the first graduate courses on participatory media in education at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education — on whose National Advisory Council he currently serves.
Shelly's background in education and learning science has informed his interest in new ventures based on research and in helping innovators to cross the chasm between research and the scalable production of new capabilities.
Active in applied research, Shelly was principal investigator on the DATASIM synthetic xAPI data project, and has contributed to over 50 research papers and presentations on topics related to instrumenting and scaling innovation in complex environments, developing the discipline and profession of Learning Engineering, the implementation of xAPI and semantic data profiles, standards-based approaches to data architecture, and ethical issues regarding artificial intelligence in the learning domain.
HOME
Shelly calls Maryland home and is obsessive about baseball, heavy metal, bluegrass, and jazz. Active in the arts and music community for over 35 years, he has performed throughout North America and Europe, has more than 30 production credits, and has served on arts-related non-profit boards including at the High Zero Foundation. He is married to the architect MJ Wojewodzki and they have three children.
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