Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum
January 24, 2008
The Business of Social Platforms
One of the fastest growing segments of the Web 2.0 universe is the range of applitions that allow members of social platforms to control and enhance their on-line experience: add wallpaper to your MySpace page; add a slideshow to your Facebook page; create your unique persona on line; etc. These developers are creating the tools you can use. and they're building great young companies in the process.
Jia Shen, co-founder and CTO of RockYou, and Troy Young, CTO of Video Egg, will lead our discussion of these companies, what they are doing and where the opportunities lie.
Jia Shen is the Chief Technology Officer
and co-founder of RockYou. He has focused extensively on graphic
design and usability throughout his professional web development
career spanning over 10 years. Prior to RockYou, Jia has held
management roles leading the user interface and technical
solutions teams at Open Harbor, and managing the majority
of engineering at Iconix. Jia started working on scalable
consumer applications at shopping tools internet provider
Bluedog, a Stanford based startup, and was part of the original
team at Bell Laboratories which developed the VoiceXML format
into the W3C standard. In addition, Jia's experience has spanned
enterprise sales and professional services functions, as he
closed transactions and integrated with large multi-national
corporation customers like Mitsubishi, Tyco, Flextronics,
and DHL. Jia has a double major in Computer Science and Computer
Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.
Darian Shirazi is the Chief Executive Officer
of Redux. Dairan began his career in Silicon Valley at the
age of 15 while working for eBay, where he worked with the
team responsible for the implementation for the online marketplace's
2003 makeover of "Sell Your Item". After working
for two summers during high school at eBay, Darian joined
Facebook as one of company's first fifteen employees. At Facebook,
Darian worked as a front-end software engineer, playing a
role in the release of the August 2005 redesign, High School
Expansion, NewsFeed, and several other features. After working
for two years at Facebook, Darian left to start his own company
with his college classmates. In December 2006, Darian raised
$1.65M at the age of 19 from Gilman Louie and Peter Thiel.
Darian completed three semesters at the University of California,
Berkeley in the field of Philosophy.
Joyce Park is the Chief Technology Officer
of Renkoo, Inc. Joyce is the co-founder of Renkoo.com, a social-event
planning site. Renkoo has also launched the popular Booze
Mail and Haikoo Zoo apps on the Facebook platform. Joyce is
the founder of 106 miles, a networking group among Silicon
Valley engineering entrepreneurs. Prior to starting Renkoo,
Joyce was a dev at Friendster, KnowNow, and Epinions. She
was educated at the University of Chicago.
Kevin Chou is the CEO of Watercooler Inc,
the world's largest television fan community online. Kevin
has led the company from founding to over fifteen million
registered fans of television entertainment across numerous
social networks online. Prior to Watercooler, Kevin spent
several years at the global venture capital firm Canaan Partners,
investing in digital media, consumer internet services, and
online advertising companies, deploying part of the firm's
$2.3 billion of capital. Earlier in Kevin's career, he advised
some of the largest public technology companies on M&A
and corporate finance as part of Deutsche Bank's investment
banking arm in San Francisco. Kevin has a BS from Haas, graduating
magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.
