DAVE SIFRY

Dave has been building and running software and internet companies for over 20 years. He has started and built 6 companies both venture-backed and bootstrapped, ranging from productivity systems, mobile apps, enterprise software, linux services, wireless, blog search, travel guides, and digital health, and . He is the founder of Technorati, serving as CEO for the first 5 years of Technorati's lifetime, and then on its board until Technorati's successful sale. He was co-founder and CTO of Sputnik, where he directed the engineering of all Sputnik products, including its WiFi security and management products, the AP120 and Sputnik Central Control. Prior to that he was co-founder, CTO, and VP of Engineering at Linuxcare, Inc., where he built Linuxcare's services infrastructure, including its managed services business, a Linux-based, managed-server technology and service for xSPs. Dave is a regular speaker on leadership, user-centered product development, blogs, and the massive changes in the digital media environment. In 2007 and 2009, Dave was selected by the World Economic Forum to participate in its Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland as a Technology Pioneer. He served on the founding board of Linux International, the advisory board of the National White Collar Crime Center, and has served as an advisor and mentor to a number of companies, including Causes, Mozilla, Alynd, Xola.com, MeetingQ, and Merchant Atlas. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. Dave lived and worked in Kobe, Japan for Mitsubishi Electric, and speaks Japanese in a rusty kansai-ben. He lives in beautiful San Francisco, CA. Specialties: Product development, Building and scaling high-tech businesses, forming and leading the founding team, venture capital funding, technology due diligence, crafting the product vision, consumer internet UX, building scalable service architectures, building and leading great teams, and doing whatever it takes to get the job done.