Sporcle is a media and entertainment company that believes in “making knowledge fun for everyone.” The company owns and operates two leading interactive digital properties: (1) sporcle.com, a user-generated quiz platform boasting over 1.7 million quizzes that have been played nearly 6 billion times, and (2) typingtest.com, the Internet’s go-to site for typing speed tests and typing training. Offline, Sporcle runs live trivia events in over 500 bars and restaurants each week across 30 states. Sporcle also hosts an annual trivia convention, SporcleCon, which draws hundreds of passionate trivia enthusiasts from around the globe. Sporcle is bootstrapped (no investors, no paid-in capital) and employs over 600 people. The company is headquartered in Seattle.

Coaching those who can benefit from my perspective as CEO, COO, engineering manager, and early employee of venture-backed startups.

I started the company with Jan Jannink and Dalton Caldwell and took a board seat instead of a full-time role due to my other commitments. I served on the Board of imeem from Dec 2003 to May 2007.The concept of imeem came upon the failure of Friendster as a social network. At the time, the thesis was that one successful social network will eventually exist but Friendster had failed due to technical limitations and internal executive turmoil. We set out to build the winning social network.By late 2005, it was clear we weren't going to be the winner, so Dalton cleverly pivoted the company to be a social network around music. At its peak, imeem was a top 50 web property in the United States with over 20M unique users per month worldwide. I came back to the company in Apr 2008 when it acquired SNOCAP. imeem was acquired by MySpace in December 2009.imeem was funded by Sequoia Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, and Adobe Systems, among others.

I was the company's first non-founding employee and for one year served as the company's interim CEO. As COO, I was responsible for engineering, product management, and technical operations. The company had two core products, a Digital Registry and MyStore, both of which I was co-inventor. The Digital Registry was a clearinghouse for record labels and unsigned artists that allowed them to register ownership of their content and set business rules. The Registry was backed by a proprietary content identification platform that recognized music based on its acoustic properties. MyStore was an embeddable widget that helped content owners sell their content anywhere online. The company signed a strategic partnership with the world's largest social network, MySpace, to use MyStore. MyStore was eventually adopted by over 100,000 individual unsigned artists and thousands of record labels, including the major labels. SNOCAP was acquired by imeem in April 2008.SNOCAP was funded by Ron Conway, Walden VC, Morgenthaler Ventures, and Court Square Ventures.

As the first non-founding employee of the popular file-sharing service, I had the privilege of writing the search engine that powered billions of queries and leading a group of inspired engineers to build a paid membership service. The service was ready to launch, but ultimately never did due to lack of licenses from record labels.My work at Napster has been profiled in the news, Joseph Menn's book "All the Rave", and Alex Winter's outstanding documentary "Downloaded." A personal description of my time at Napster was published by Business Insider (https://www.businessinsider.com/what-it-was-like-to-work-at-the-original-napster-2014-10).Napster was funded by Yosi Amram, Ron Conway, Hummer Winblad, and Bertelsmann.