Management
Duncan Greatwood – CEO
Duncan has over 20 years of experience with high-technology growth companies, and brings a combination of sales, marketing, technology and operations skills to Topsy. Prior to joining Topsy, Duncan was founder and C.E.O. of PostPath, an enterprise-email-software company (acquired by Cisco Systems). Previously, Duncan held executive positions at Virata/GlobespanVirata/Conexant, including the positions of Vice President Worldwide Marketing, Vice President Corporate Development, and Vice President European Sales. Prior to Virata, Mr. Greatwood held a variety of engineering and marketing positions at Madge Networks, and was particularly involved in the development of pioneering products featuring the convergence of voice telephony and data networking. Duncan graduated with a B.A. in Mathematics and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Oxford University, and an M.B.A. from London Business School, and holds granted and/or submitted patents in the areas of data storage, data access, and near-real-time processing.
Vipul Ved Prakash – Co-Founder and CTO
Vipul Ved Prakash is a pioneer in the field of collaborative filtering. In 2001, Prakash co-founded Cloudmark to create an Internet scale version of his open-source spam filter, Vipul’s Razor. Cloudmark crossed one billion subscribers in 2009 and is the leading worldwide platform for messaging security. Prior to Cloudmark, Prakash was an engineer at Napster and was named one of the Top 100 Young Innovators in the world by MIT Technology Review. Before moving to the Bay Area in 2001, Prakash co-founded Sense/Net, a popular ISP in India, and worked for Silicon Graphics, NIIT, BPL and TradeIndia. Prakash holds multiple patents for his work on document classification and anonymous data pooling. He sits on the Topsy board of directors and is an active contributor to the Topsy codebase.
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh – Co-Founder and Chief Scientist
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh started “First Monday,” the most widely read peer-reviewed journal of the Internet, in 1995, with Ed Valauskas, Esther Dyson, and Vint Cerf. In 2000, at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, Ghosh started the Collaborative Creativity Group, the leading research group on the economics of free/open source software, Wikipedia and other forms of collaborative innovation. He has extensively researched and published how reputation works and motivates in online communities for more than 12 years, collaborating with Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge and Tsinghua Universities, with grants from the US National Science Foundation and European Commission. Ghosh is also a board member of the Open Source Initiative.
Gary Iwatani – Co-Founder and COO
Gary Iwatani has more than 20 years of operations and finance experience working with software, Internet, and digital media companies. He spent the last five years as President and COO of Cloudmark, where he worked with Topsy Co-Founder and CEO Vipul Ved Prakash to successfully commercialize the world’s largest collaborative messaging security platform. Prior to Cloudmark, Iwatani was senior vice president and chief financial officer of digital music company, Liquid Audio, Inc., where he grew the company from 20 employees to more than 200, and took the company public in 1999. He raised $72 million in the Liquid Audio IPO and an additional $98 million in a follow-on offering. Iwatani was also chief financial officer of consumer software publisher, Berkeley Systems, where he helped successfully expand the company’s AfterDark screen saver franchise into digital entertainment prior to selling the company to Cendant. Iwatani also held management positions with Ernst and Young, US West and Insignia Solutions. He holds a bachelor of science degree in accounting from Santa Clara University and is a certified public accountant in the state of California.
Scott Banister – Co-Founder
Scott Banister co-founded IronPort, an email appliance provider, in December 2000. The company was acquired in 2007 by Cisco for US$830 million. Banister was also an early advisor and board member at PayPal, and served as Vice President of Ideas at idealab!, where he contributed numerous innovations, including the unique bid-for-placement search engine model that powers Overture. Banister is also the chairman of Zivity, a social networking site he co-founded with his wife, Cyan Banister. He was an early investor in Powerset, a startup building a natural language search engine. He is a board member for Slide, a start-up founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin. Other private equity investments include Zappos.com, LiveOps, Facebook, Hi5.com, Tagged.com, iLike, and Causes.com. Scott sits on the Topsy board of directors.
Eddie Smith – Chief Revenue Officer
Eddie Smith has been building businesses within the digital marketing sector for past past 20 years and excels at creating solutions from technology, data and media. He is responsible for leading Topsy’s distribution, partner and monetization efforts. Prior to Topsy, Smith headed Quantcast’s platform business, integrating Quantcast data within the audience-buying ecosystem used by the world’s largest brands. Before that, he led network distribution, marketing, and sales efforts for Socialmedia.com, pioneering the development of social content on Facebook and Twitter. He is actively involved in the evolution of social marketing, co-chairing the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s social ad committee and co-authored its initial Social Advertising Best Practices. His prior professional engagements include NexTag, DoubleClick and Reuters Marketing Information.
Ted Cui – VP Search Platform
Ted Cui has more than 15 years experience in software development and engineering management. He is specialized in building state-of-the-art large-scale data processing systems that are fast, robust and scalable. Before joining Topsy, Cui was the architect at Vobile Inc., where he led the development of video identification system. Prior to Vobile, he worked for Ironport Systems (acquired by Cisco) as principal engineer, building software infrastructures for the anti-spam system.
David Berk – VP Operations
David Berk has more than 15 years experience in online operations and engineering management. Prior to Topsy David was Vice President, Operations at Gazillion Entertainment, a developer and operator of massive scale online entertainment. He has held technology leadership roles at Sony, Viacom and Register.com. He co-founded and was General Manager of MobyGames (acquired by GameFly). David earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from DePaul University, and an M.B.A. from Columbia University.
Board of Directors
- John Malloy – BlueRun Ventures
- Cameron Myhrvold – Ignition Partners
- Scott Banister – Entrepreneur and investor
- Duncan Greatwood – Topsy CEO
- Vipul Ved Prakash – Topsy CTO Co-Founder
- Gary Iwatani – Topsy COO and Co-founder