Northwestern University

Executive Director at Common Crawl Foundation

Common Crawl Foundation

Executive Director

Software Engineering Director

Built one of the most comprehensive worldwide restaurant database and recommendation engines. Crawled menus from a vast number of restaurants worldwide, as well as restaurant websites, critic reviews, and social media images. Leveraged customer history and preferences to provide recommendations.

Tobiko

Founder

Developed a new social activism platform to help increase civic engagement. Worked with partners to onboard them onto the app, and integrate their content and APIs into our database. Designed and built architecture to match users based on location, interests, and the social graph.

Magnify Progress

Successfully incorporated web crawl technology into IBM across Watson, Research, Cloud, and Sales. Led efforts to establish IBM Watson's legal "Right to Read" the web as an emerging AI technology. Built a new product line, Watson Insights, that productized the web crawl and Watson APIs, and sold to Fortune 500 companies. Successfully retained acquired employees, grew the team, and exceeded financial targets.

IBM Watson

Developed and launched a new web search engine with a 1 billion page index focused on reducing web spam. Served over 300 million searches per month to consumers and partners. Drove monetization through experiments and incremental improvements. Recruited team and led technology development. Raised over $60 million from investors. Led the technical architecture for a novel distributed key-value store with real-time map/reduce capability and developed the web-scale crawler. Acquired by IBM Watson.

Blekko

Built a large local news portal with aggregation and bootstrapped community. Leveraged a comprehensive knowledge base to categorize news stories by subject and location. Used the same technology to improve ad performance. Acquired by Tribune, Gannett and Knight Ridder.

Topix

Launched a bootstrapped startup to crowdsource the creation of a web directory to compete with Yahoo. This was the first instantiation of an open content directory that was maintained by a community of volunteer editors. Built a directory 6X the size of Yahoo in 6 months with 80,000 users. Sold company to Netscape where it became the central content on Netscape's search portal.

NewHoo / Open Directory

Led integration of DMOZ into Netscape Search and integration with AOL Search. Pioneered first integrations with Goto.com and Google. Led engineering for AOL Shopping Search and AOL Music.

Netscape / America Online

Director of Engineering

Managed team of 10 to deliver IP-level cryptography to clients and government agencies. Lead development of the SKIP key management software, including the certificate discovery protocol, key manager and the cryptographic random number generator. Implemented product support for Dallas Semiconductor iButton devices to be used as hardware crypto tokens.

Sun Microsystems

Engineering Manager

Unix kernel and tools development. Responsible for the kernel high resolution timer implementation, the kernel build and configuration tools and the dynamic loadable module mechanism. Also worked on the design and implementation team for UnixWare's device autoconfiguration facility and support for the Intel Pentium Pro (P6) processor.

Novell / Unix System Laboratories

Software Engineer

One of four engineers in a skunkworks project porting Unix SVR4 to the Amiga 68020. Owned everything in /usr/bin, /usr/lib, and the system installation tools. Worked to get SVR4 up in time for UNIFORUM '90. Amiga Unix was the first non-Intel Unix SVR4 port available.

Rich Skrenta