Rich Aberman was co-founder of WePay (YC S09), a payments API for B2B SaaS and point-of-sale platforms. As Chief Product and Strategy Officer, he helped raise $75M in venture capital, grow the company to 300 employees, and achieve profitability before being acquired by JPMorgan Chase in 2018. He holds a degree in economics, political science, and philosophy from Boston College.
Wayne Crosby
Wayne Crosby was the co-founder of Zenter (W07), the collaborative presentation product that was acquired by Google and turned into Google Slides. Wayne also founded Humu, a product that uses behavioral science and machine learning to help teams at large enterprises achieve greater happiness and better performance, and OrgOrg, which builds tools to help small businesses and organizations run more efficiently.
Umur Cubukcu
Umur Cubukcu was the co-founder and CEO of Citus Data (S11), the creators of the distributed PostgreSQL database Citus. Citus Data was acquired in 2019 by Microsoft, where he spent nearly four years leading the PostgreSQL product team at Azure. He received his MS from Stanford University.
Pete Koomen
Pete Koomen co-founded Optimizely (W10) which helps companies run experiments on their websites and apps. He helped Optimizely grow from inception, to $100M+ in ARR to, ultimately, its acquisition in 2020. Pete holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
David Lieb
David Lieb was previously the co-founder and CEO of Bump (S09), which was acquired by Google in 2013 and evolved into what is now Google Photos. Before Bump, Dave was a researcher in the Stanford AI Lab and a software engineer at Texas Instruments. He holds EE/CS degrees from Princeton and Stanford and finished ½ an MBA at Chicago Booth before dropping out to start Bump.
Emmett Shear
Emmett Shear was co-founder and CEO of Twitch, the massively popular live streaming service that began its life as Justin.tv (W07). Twitch was acquired by Amazon in 2014, with Emmett staying on as Twitch’s CEO until he stepped away from the role in 2023. He graduated from Yale University in 2005 with a degree in computer science.
Founders
Trevor Blackwell
Founder, Retired
Trevor Blackwell is a roboticist who in 2007 built the first dynamically balancing [biped robot](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_CQ5AKaEi3U). He has published papers on congestion control in high speed wide area networks, signalling protocol architecture, and file system performance. He has a BEng from Carleton, and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.
Paul Graham
Founder, Retired
Paul Graham is the author of [On Lisp](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0130305529/) (1993), [ANSI Common Lisp](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0133708756/) (1995), and [Hackers & Painters](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596006624/) (2004). In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first SaaS company, which in 1998 [became](http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release184.html) Yahoo Store. In 2002 he discovered a simple spam filtering algorithm that inspired the current generation of filters. He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.
Jessica Livingston
Founder, Retired
Jessica Livingston was previously VP of marketing at investment bank Adams Harkness, where she managed an award-winning rebranding of the company. She is the author of [Founders at Work](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590597141) (2007), a book of interviews with startup founders. She has a BA in English from Bucknell.
Robert Morris
Founder, Retired
Robert Morris is a professor of computer science at MIT, where he is a member of the [PDOS](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/) group. He has published extensively on wireless networks, distributed operating systems, and peer-to-peer applications. In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public. He has an AB and PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.