The Team
Founding Executives
Amit drives Gravity's strategy and execution.
Amit was formerly the Chief Operating Officer of MySpace, where he led operations, business development, and strategic partnerships. He was an early MySpace employee, where he oversaw the development and growth of MySpace Music and MySpace Mobile. While Amit was COO, MySpace rose to 125 million users and was profitable with nearly a billion dollars in revenue. Amit studied Mechanical Engineering at Stanford. He grew up in a small farm town in South Dakota with dreams of starting an innovative tech company.
Jim leads Gravity's research and engineering efforts.
Jim was formerly the SVP of Technology of MySpace, where he led technical operations and R&D. He was employee 12 at MySpace and the first technical architect. Jim was responsible for the initial architectural designs that allowed the site to scale from 100 thousand to over 125 million active users. Jim grew up in Ventura, CA, and studied business at USC. He's had a lifelong passion for CS teaching himself to program
at age 5.
Steve oversees product development for Gravity.
Steve was formerly the SVP of Product Strategy for MySpace and the company's first PM. Many of Steve's early product ideas led to the explosive adoption of MySpace. Steve grew up in Fresno and escaped to study at Pepperdine. He lives in LA with his wife and two kids. He's had a lifelong passion for technology and science (especially magnetism – he keeps ferrofluid liquids in his kitchen to play with in his spare time).
Team Leaders
Chris Bissell
Chief Software
Architect
Chris is responsible for Gravity's information architecture.
Chris is responsible for the architecture and design of our interest service, graphing algorithms, and ontology. He specializes in graph design, ontology building, and other core algorithms. Chris was the Chief Software Architect at MySpace. He introduced MySpace's first caching system and led teams addressing site scaling and performance. Before that, he was a founding member of GCells, a startup where he built a distributed, multi-user system for populating and visualizing living and working spaces in the browser.
Karl leads Gravity's business development & strategic partnerships.
Before Gravity, Karl was an investment banker at Pagemill Partners where he advised technology companies and startups in mergers and acquisitions and venture financings. Karl worked on M&A transactions with Ask, Microsoft, Cisco, CA, and Alcatel, among others. Karl has a BS from Stanford and an MBA with honors from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, where he was a Mayfield Fellow.
Richard
Buckingham
VP Engineering
Richard manages Gravity’s Engineering Team.
He joined Gravity from the Dreamworks Animation funded startup “Ptch” where he ran Ops, lead the Server Engineering Team and was Product Manager for the website. He was previously VP of Tech Ops at both HP Cloud Services and at MySpace where he managed large international teams and infrastructures. Richard graduated from Leeds University, UK with BSc Honors in Computer Science. He is also a former RAF Reserve pilot but now prefers car racing and poker.
Robert Leon
VP Sales
Robert is responsible for Sales and Publisher Development.
Previously, he was an early member of Meebo, evangelizing a new consumer product to agencies and building out a sales team as the VP of the West. Before working in digital media, Robert worked in politics on the Howard Dean and John Kerry campaigns. He holds a degree in Government from Claremont McKenna College and is originally from Orange County, CA. He correspondingly likes road trips, movies and oranges.
Advisors
Michael Jordan
Prof EE & CS
Berkeley
Leading expert in AI, NLP & machine learning.
Michael is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent research has focused on Bayesian nonparametric analysis, probabilistic graphical models, spectral methods, kernel machines, signal processing, statistical genetics, computational biology, information retrieval and natural language processing. Michael was named to the National Academy of Sciences in 2010 and the National Academy of Engineering in 2010. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been named a Neyman Lecturer and a Medallion Lecturer by Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He is a Fellow of the IMS, IEEE, AAAI and ASA.
Dan Jurafsky
Prof Linguistics
Stanford
Leading expert in computational linguistics.
Dan is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. Dan received a BA in Linguistics and a PhD in Computer Science, both from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the recipient of a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship, and is the co-author with Jim Martin of the widely-used textbook "Speech and Language Processing". Recent research interests include the induction of meaning, machine translation and other issues in Chinese NLP, the role of probability in human word production, the application of natural language processing to social science topics including social psychology and the sociology of science, and the linguistics of food.
David Andre
CEO
Cerebellum Capital
Statistical machine learning guru.
David is a scientist, inventor and entrepreneur. He is currently CEO at Cerebellum Capital, where he is building black-box market prediction algorithms. Previously, David was Director of Research at BodyMedia, where he developed machine learning algorithms to draw conclusions about human physiology and activity. His team collected the world's largest physiological database. David continues to work on methods for automated program and agent design, including various forms of reinforcement learning. David holds both an AB and a BS from Stanford and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Berkeley, where he was awarded a Hertz Fellowship. David has co-founded several companies, including Blue Pumpkin Software and Just Passing Through.
Investors
Partner, RedPoint Ventures
Geoff is a Founding Partner of Redpoint Ventures. Before Redpoint, Geoff was a General Partner with IVP. Geoff invests in consumer media and infrastructure. Some of his investments include Ask, Excite, MySpace, TiVo, and Juniper Networks. He currently serves on the board of Bluefin, BranchOut, Clicker (acquired by CBS), Formspring, Gaia Online, Gravity, Machinima, Oodle and Scribd, among other companies. Geoff holds a BSE from Princeton University and an MBA from Stanford GSB. Geoff is currently on the advisory council for the Stanford GSB and was previously a Director of the National Venture Capital Association.
Partner, August Capital
David is a Partner at August Capital. David invests in consumer internet and software companies. Previously, David was an attorney at Venture Law Group and Perkins Coie. Some of his investments include Aardvark (acquired by Google), Bill.com, eBates, Evite (acquired by Ticketmaster), LiveOps, PayCycle (acquired by Intuit), and Technorati. He serves on the board of Blippy, Gravity, Nomis, Rocket Lawyer, Splunk, StumbleUpon, and SAY Media. David holds an AB from Stanford, an M.Phil from Cambridge, and a JD from Harvard Law School. David is a lecturer at Stanford GSB and at Harvard Law School, the author of VentureBlog and VentureCast, and the founder and executive producer of The Lobby conference.