Advisors

Rich Skrenta

Rich is a seasoned technology executive with nearly two decades of industry experience. He is currently CEO of Blekko, a disruptive general-purpose search engine. Previously, he was founder and CEO of Topix, the leading online news community. Prior to Topix, Rich headed up product development for a variety of products with AOL, including AOL Shopping, AOL Music and Netscape Search and Directory. Previous to AOL, Rich was the co-founder and CEO of NewHoo, which was acquired by Netscape and renamed the Open Directory Project (ODP). The ODP is the world's largest human edited directory of the web and is still used by Google, Alexa, AOL, and many other companies. Rich was an engineering manager at Sun Microsystems prior to NewHoo and has also had development roles at Unix Systems Labs and the Amiga UNIX Group at Commodore Business Machines.

Rich holds a patent in network security and has authored many well-known pioneering software efforts, including some of the first multi-user online games. Rich graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in Computer Science.

Jawed Karim

Jawed co-founded YouTube to enable individuals worldwide to broadcast themselves. YouTube is now the third most popular website in the world and one of the fastest-growing websites in the history of the Internet. Prior to YouTube, Jawed was one of the earliest engineers at PayPal, now the world's largest online payment service, where he implemented its first real-time anti-fraud systems.

Jawed has a B.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a Ph.D. student in computer science at Stanford University. Jawed is also a Sequoia Technology Partner at Sequoia Capital.

Adam Jackson

Adam is an experienced entrepreneur and technology architect. He is currently the Founder and EVP of DriverSide, a venture-funded startup in the online automotive category. In 2004, he founded MarketSquare, which was one of the first online local shopping destinations on the Internet. In 2005, MarketSquare was acquired by StepUp Commerce, which was subsequently acquired by Intuit, Inc. in September 2006.

Adam began his career as a software engineer and architect. His first business was an ecommerce consulting company that provided fraud detection software to the mortgage industry and various online shopping outlets. He serves as an investor and advisor to several new media businesses and holds a bachelor's degree from Vanderbilt University.

Kartik Hosanagar

Dr. Kartik Hosanagar is an assistant professor of Information and Operations Management at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Hosanagar´s research interests are in Internet commerce with a special emphasis on Internet media and Internet marketing. His work focuses on how consumers choose media and products on the Internet using information filters like search engines, recommender systems and comparison shopping engines and how firms influence this process using various forms of Internet advertising. As part of this stream of work on Internet media, he also studies how firms distribute media to consumers using Content Delivery Networks, P2P and other overlay infrastructure.

His dissertation research received the William Cooper Award for best thesis in Management Science (2004) and the eBusiness Research Center (eBRC) doctoral award (2002). Dr. Hosanagar has received the best paper award at the Consortium on Technology Policy and Management (2002) and has been nominated for the best paper award at the Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (2002). He is a recipient of the National Talent Search scholarship from the Government of India (1992), a doctoral fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University, a University scholarship at Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences (BITS, Pilani), India, and was also offered the Castanga fellowship at University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Hosanagar has a B.A. in Electronics and an M.A. in Information Systems, both from Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences (BITS, Pilani), India, as well as an M.Phil. in Management Science and a Ph.D. in Management Science and Information Systems from the Heinz School of Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

In his spare time, Dr. Hosanagar pursues entrepreneurial interests. He is a co-founder of Yodle and serves on the advisory boards of several other startups.

Kevin Hartz

Kevin co-founded Eventbrite, a popular event registration service, with the goal of simplifying event management and ticketing. Prior to Eventbrite, Kevin was co-founder and CEO of Xoom Corporation, an international money transfer company providing service in over 30 countries, whose investors included Peter Thiel, Sequoia Capital and Stanford University. Kevin also co-founded ConnectGroup, a startup providing high-speed Internet access to the hotel industry, which was acquired by Lodgenet in 1998.

Kevin holds a B.A. and B.S. from Stanford University and an M.A. from Oxford University. He has been an early-stage investor and advisor to startups such as PayPal, Geni.com, Friendster, Flixster.com, and Trulia.

Kevin is also a Sequoia Technology Partner at Sequoia Capital. You can see his full list of affiliations at kevinhartz.com.

Aditya Agarwal

Aditya Agarwal is Director of Engineering at Facebook, where he helps manage the engineering team and oversees new product design and architecture. He works on Search, Advertising and News Feed.

Aditya was one of the co-authors of Thrift, a popular open-source RPC framework, and holds a master's and bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

In his spare time, he listens to house music and attempts to play cricket.