Management

• Ethan Stock

  Founder & Chief Executive Officer

  Ethan co-founded Zvents in early 2005 with funding from NetService Ventures Group, where he has served as a partner since 2002. Ethan brings a diverse background in scholarship and technology to the pursuit of entrepreneurial ventures. In 1996, while in graduate school at UC Berkeley on an NSF fellowship, he founded Bamboo Systems, an early entrant in the CRM market. In 2000, he served as COO of eBusinessMedia, the B2B Internet arm of UK publisher United News & Media, where he oversaw the launch of multiple industry-focused internet content and commerce properties, including the first deployment of CommerceOne in Europe. A programmer since he was ten years old, Ethan worked as a systems engineer at EDS and was a principal consultant at strategy firm The McKenna Group in the late 1990s. He holds a B.A. in History from The Ohio State University.

  

  Ethan Stock

  Likes: Wine, Travel

  Dislikes: Cheap chocolate, Slow drivers

  Fast Facts: Ethan built his first piece of furniture when he was three years old. He was industrious even as a wee lad.

• Tyler Kovacs

  Founder & Chief Architect

  Tyler has been creating dynamic websites powered by open-source frameworks and databases for the past 10 years. Most recently, Tyler has been responsible for developing Zvents products and underlying technology, including software development, architectural design, automated testing, systems installation and administration, and database design and administration.
  Prior to Zvents, Tyler built a number of customer-facing and internal web-based applications both professionally for startups Narus and Network Physics, and as a volunteer for several nonprofit organizations, including the San Francisco Food Bank. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from McGill University.

  

  Tyler Kovacs

  Likes: Live music, Comedy

  Dislikes: Global warming, Sock puppets

  Fast Facts: Tyler founded Zvents in hopes of finding local piñata-making classes. Mission accomplished.

• Gordon Rios

  Chief Technology Officer

  Gordon is a proven leader in search and search-related technologies. Over the past 10 years he has focused his efforts on devising machine learning systems for web search, document classification, and text mining. At Inktomi he developed the scoring engine for a user click-based ranking application that was deployed at HotBot and Snap, was a major contributor to the Directory Engine product which classified millions of web documents into over 10,000 categories, and was a founding member of Inktomi's Web Search Relevance Group. Moving to Proofpoint, an enterprise messaging company, he led the development of the award-winning MLX(tm) technology used in their industry leading anti-spam product. Most recently Gordon worked at Yahoo! in the International Relevance team, where he worked on all aspects of search engine relevance and developed production code running in all major international markets. Gordon holds an MBA in Finance and a master's degree in Engineering and Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley. His Erdös number is 4.

  

  Gordon Rios

  Likes: Political debate, Dachschunds

  Dislikes: Spam, Irrational greed

  Fast Facts: Gordon once aspired to be a secret agent, but instead became a search technologist who likes strategy games.

• Paul Denton

  Chief Financial Officer

  Paul brings over 20 years of leadership to Zvents from a wide variety of industries and management positions. He has held executive roles with numerous start-up and emerging growth companies in Silicon Valley. Through his expertise in financial management and business operations, combined with his solid leadership skills, Paul has helped numerous companies successfully reach the next level of their business. Paul has held management positions at Booz Allen Hamilton and Exxon/Esso Petroleum Company. Prior to joining Zvents, Paul was CFO at Determina and COO/CFO at Andale. He holds an MBA from Stanford University and a BS with Honors in Chemical Engineering from University of Birmingham, UK.

  

  Paul Denton

  Likes: Bike riding, Watching sports

  Dislikes: Drivers who turn without signaling, Olives

  Fast Facts: Paul is a nationally licensed soccer trainer who coaches two youth teams!

• Robert Krohn

  Vice President of Engineering

  Robert has a proven track record of building world-class engineering teams and market leading products. He has over 15 years of systems engineering and management experience in a variety of high technology corporations and startups in Silicon Valley. Before joining Zvents, Robert was the co-founder and CEO of My Digital Life (MDL), a software startup uniting the worlds of smartphones, consumer electronics, and online services. Prior to MDL, he was a senior director at Juniper Networks, where he held various positions ranging from business development, platform engineering management, and software engineering management. Robert has also worked in management and individual contributor roles at Nexsi, Electronics for Imaging, Xerox AODS, and Hewlett Packard. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering Degree in Digital Systems and Computer Engineering from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University.

  

  Robert Krohn

  Likes: Spearmint gum, Ocean swimming

  Dislikes: Sand in his trunks

  Fast Facts: Robert won the regional home brewers competition for his Noethaler Weisse beer in 2000 in Mountain View, CA.

• Jon Sofield

  Vice President of Business Development

  Jon brings a strong entrepreneurial flair to the business of developing global partnerships. His optimistic vision for creating and maintaining solid relationships has enabled him to facilitate the growth of several companies starting with the preliminary concept to rapid development and revenue building. Prior to Zvents, Jon held several executive management roles, in both sales and business development, at Commerce One, Intalio and ICL. Jon also started two companies in the U.S. and U.K., which shows his dedicated entrepreneurial spirit. In 1995, he established a Local Content Podcasting company, Podloco, and in 1996, he set up the first European E-commerce services company. Jon holds a Civil Engineering Honors Degree from Coventry Lanchester University.

  

  Jon Sofield

  Likes: Pool Parties, Disco

  Dislikes: Dogs in purses, Highway 101

  Fast Facts: Jon loves watching dramatic epic movies and has watched El Cid at least 20 times.

• Paul O'Brien

  Vice President of Marketing

  Paul O'Brien brings search and marketing expertise to Zvents following his work with HP's direct-to-consumer Home and Home Office Store where he directed interactive and search marketing programs. A search, online marketing, web design and ecommerce professional with over 15 years of experience online, Paul is a demonstrated leader in e-commerce, marketing, and Search with relationships and skills in both B2B and B2C markets. Prior to HP, O'Brien managed Advertising Solutions at Yahoo! where he directed marketing campaigns for Yahoo!'s tech industry advertisers. He oversaw sales programs operations and the development of portfolio marketing techniques for the technology industry in Small business, Yahoo! Shopping, Search, early instances of Yahoo! Tech, the Homepage, and other properties. Previously, he was a consultant for various web portals designing and developing Web sites, e-commerce, and marketing strategies. Paul was recently published in the book, Online Marketing Heroes, and continues to blog at seobrien.com.

  

  Paul O'Brien

  Likes: Karaoke, Baja Fresh

  Dislikes: Bad breath, Jazzercize

  Fast Facts: Paul has a serious disdain for tarantulas, especially after he was nearly attacked by them in Arizona while driving through the desert.

• Somer Simpson

  Senior Director, Product Management

  Somer comes to Zvents after a 12-year career in the print media space, focusing on online editorial and product development for newspapers, entertainment weeklies and special publications for top media companies NYTRNG, Tribune and Knight Ridder. Somer was a leading influence at Knight Ridder Digital, managing several major online product initiatives, including the development of KRD's centralized content management and entertainment systems. In 2004 she took over responsibility for KRD's Product Development team, assuming responsibility for planning and development for KRD platforms, procurement and management of vendor relationships and product marketing evangelism for KRD properties. Somer's areas of expertise include CMS, entertainment products and interface usability.

  In 2005, Somer was a driving force in using innovative new Web 2.0 technologies as part of the online coverage of Hurricane Katrina for the Biloxi Sun Herald. The team that produced this coverage won a Pulitzer in 2006 for community service.

  

  Somer Simpson

  Likes: Body art, Shortcuts

  Dislikes: Bad photography, Britney Spears

  Fast Facts: Somer likes playing punk rock star with her daughter and going to Disneyland – the happiest place on earth!

• Erica Langdon

  Director of Content

  Erica has been a software engineer and manager for over 10 years, most notably at AltaVista, where she worked on the effort to provide Unicode search, which made AltaVista the first search engine capable of serving Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian queries on the Web. She was AltaVista's first Content Engineering Manager, writing their first index content policies and responsible for the Content Team, which handled spam defense and automated content selection for the search index, but from an engineering and an editorial perspective. Most recently, Erica was a Product Engineer at Agile Mind, a leading educational software company.

  

  Erica Langdon

  Likes: Writing, Vampire Stories

  Dislikes: Traffic Jams, Sleeping

  Fast Facts: Erica likes writing fiction in her spare time when her creative juices are flowing. She can also read the Cyrillic alphabet!

• Doug Judd

  Principal Search Architect

  Doug has over a decade of software engineering experience in the area of information retrieval. Early in his career he joined Verity, Inc. as an engineer where he helped build the core VDK developer toolkit. He subsequently moved on to Inktomi, Inc. where he spent five years in both engineering and management positions in the crawling and indexing group of the Web Search division. He designed and implemented the indexing system used for indexing web content for the Web Search service. Most recently, Doug worked with Kosmix, Inc. where he built a distributed web crawler and scaled it to a billion documents. Doug earned a B.S. in Computer Science from U.C. Santa Barbara in 1992 and holds four patents in search technology.

  

  Doug Judd

  Likes: Acoustic guitar, Robot demolition derby

  Dislikes: Fluorescent lighting, Suits

  Fast Facts: Doug is an occasional adventure-seeker who once bungee jumped off a bridge on the south island of New Zealand.

• Luke Lu

  Principal Architect

  Luke brings forth over 10 years of expertise in algorithms and architectural design for large scale information retrieval. He is the co-founder of community-based social search engine Wink, the people search engine, which allows users to find people across social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, and MySpace. Prior to joining Zvents, Luke served as Wink's Chief Architect, responsible for the design and development of PeopleRank and advanced search technologies. Luke was also a Software Engineer and team lead at Inktomi, where he designed and implemented the second generation Inktomi search index and rewrote the indexer tool-chain. This major improvement over Inktomi's initial search solution was implemented by Yahoo! Search, components of which are still in use today.

  

  Luke Lu

  Likes: Big Smiles, Scenic office views

  Dislikes: Propaganda, Cigarettes

  Fast Facts: Luke likes tinkering on his computer and conjuring up ways to change the world of technology!

• Board of Directors

  • Laura Brege
    Laura Brege, General Partner at Red Rock Ventures and current EVP & Chief Business Officer at Onyx Pharmaceuticals. She also held senior financial positions at COR Therapeutics, Flextronics, and The Cooper Companies.
  • David Carlick
    David Carlick, Managing Director at VantagePoint Venture Partners, has been a director at numerous Internet companies over the past decade, including Ask Jeeves and Intermix (MySpace.com), and was an early co-founder of DoubleClick and Poppe Tyson's poppe.com group.
  • John Gardner
    John Gardner, Partner at Nokia Growth Partners, has led and managed investments in companies across the information technology spectrum. He was one of the founding partners at BlueRun Ventures before joining Nokia Growth Partners, and has extensive experience advising and working with start-up and emerging businesses.
  • Paul Levine
    Paul Levine, Vice President of Marketing at AdBrite, is responsible for the company's marketing, public relations, and customer operations. Prior to joining AdBrite, he was Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo! Local, and grew it to become the internet's leading local content property.
  • Paul Martino
    Paul Martino, CEO of Aggregate Knowledge, was the founding CTO of Tribe.net and founding CEO of Ahpah Software, a Java security company. He previously held business development positions at Intertrust and SkyPilot.
  • Doug Power
    Doug Power, Vice President of Corporate Development at NAVTEQ Corporation, is responsible for executing the company’s inorganic growth strategy through acquisitions, investments, and strategic partnerships. Prior to NAVTEQ, Doug was Director of Corporate Development at Lucent Technologies Inc. and Vice President of Mergers & Acquisitions at Merrill Lynch & Co. in New York City.
  • Jason Whitt
    Jason Whitt, Vice President at VantagePoint Venture Partners, serves their Information Technology Group focusing on digital media, wireless, and consumer oriented technology investments. He was responsible for acquisitions, venture investing, and corporate strategy for Cisco Systems' Corporate Business Development group and has worked with Xros, Nortel Networks, and TransVascular (acquired by Medtronic).
  • Ethan Stock
    Ethan Stock, Founder and CEO of Zvents.