Founders

Max Ventilla, Zoo Director, drives our strategy and business development. Max came from Google where he focused on strategy for Google's marketing and monetization initiatives around Adsense and web applications. Previously, he was VP of Business Development for Trader Classified Media and founded Krypteian Systems, an enterprise email datamining tool powering expertise and contact directories. Max has a BS in Math and Physics and a MBA from Yale.

Damon Horowitz, Lion Tamer, oversees product development and research strategy. Since working under Marvin Minsky in the '90s, Damon has built numerous companies around applications of intelligent language processing. Damon co-founded Perspecta (acquired by Excite), served as Senior Architect for Novation Biosciences (acquired by Agilent), and co-founded NewsDB (now Daylife). He has a BA in Computer Science from Columbia, a MS from MIT Media Lab, and a PhD from Stanford.

Nathan Stoll, Keeper of Insectivores, leads all infrastructure and release initiatives. Nathan came from Google, where he headed Google News for three years, overseeing its rapid expansion to more than 40 countries and growth into one of the top global news sites. In his first few years at Google, Nathan launched Google Suggest and helped develop the Adwords system and Adsense pricing models. Nathan holds a BS in Computer Science and a BA in Political Science from Stanford.

Rob Spiro, Assistant Curator of Birds, leads our quantitative and qualitative user research initiatives. Rob's constant focus is making sure that The Mechanical Zoo's products are easy to understand and intuitive to use -- and solve real user needs. Previously, Rob co-founded Mifly, a mobile software startup, and Reelblogs, a new media company, after working in consulting. Rob holds a BA in History from Yale.

Senior Team Members

Fritz Schneider, Creationist, spent 5 years at Google where he founded and led Google's Firefox and Application Security teams. Prior to Google, Fritz contributed to several startups including anonymizer.com. He co-authored "Javascript: The Complete Reference" and holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Columbia and a MS in Computer Science from UCSD.

Winton Davies, Evolutionist, spent the last twenty years designing and developing machine learning algorithms. He was a founding member of Yahoo Research Labs and a Principal Research Engineer at Overture, GoTo, and Cadabra. Winton holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Reading in addition to a MS in Artificial Intelligence and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Aberdeen.

Paul Bankhead, Giant Squid Handler, was a manager in Google's Business Operations group where he led international operations initiatives, company-wide recruiting process improvements, and Google's renewable energy planning. Previously, Paul was a consultant at McKinsey. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from BYU.

Advisors

Sep Kamvar founded Kaltix, a contextualized search company acquired by Google. At Google, he led engineering for personalized search products for 5 years. He now teaches Computational Mathematics at Stanford and is chairman of Wildflower Capital.

Michael Dearing teaches at Stanford's design school. He previously spent 7 years at eBay, where he was a Senior Vice President in charge of marketing and seller strategy. He has also held leadership positions at Bain and Disney.