Jim Pitkow - What Defines an Early Stage A+ VP of Engineering?

Abstract
Jim Pitkow: What makes an A+ VP of Engineering ?

Early stage companies are quite different across a wide variety of dimensions than more established organizations. This creates a set of challenges as well as opportunities for leadership. There are many pitfalls - success failure (user demand outstrips engineering's ability to service the demand, e.g., Twitter early 2008), absence of clear product definition and it's corollary - the mother-of-all PRDs, ever changing/flip-flopping management directives, dealing with Board, funding, and investor dynamics, etc. During the talk we will define what makes or breaks engineering leaders during this stage of company growth. The talk will focus on providing real-world, practical advice.

Speaker
Jim Pitkow

Bio
Jim is currently currently working on some early stage projects and investments. Most recently, Jim was CEO and Chairman of Moreover Technologies, where he successfully restructured the company through acquisition by VeriSign in October of 2005. Before Moreover, Jim was the President and Chairman of Outride Inc., a spinout from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which was acquired by Google. The company was the first to bring user model-based information retrieval to commercial viability, demonstrating a 50+% reduction in the time it takes people - novices and experts alike - to find information on the Web (see CACM article).

Prior to his work at Outride, Jim was a research scientist at Xerox PARC and Chair of the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Characterization Activity. While at PARC, Jim helped create an intellectual property portfolio focused on Web technology that has resulted in nearly three-dozen issued and pending patent applications and has published in leading academic publications including Science. Besides the research and development on user model-based information retrieval that became Outride, Jim played a significant role in the User Interface Research Group (Dr. Stuart Card Manager) and Internet Ecologies Group (Dr. Bernardo Huberman Manager) along with the development of the Law of Surfing and Information Scent. In 1998, he was part of a small team that reported to Xerox's Senior Staff to review Xerox's multi-billion dollar research portfolio to identify technological discontinuities.

Jim received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1997. His dissertation, "Characterizing World Wide Web Ecologies" was one of the first dissertations dedicated towards empirically understanding the dynamics of the Web and devising smarter algorithms to tame the content, structure, and usage of the Web. In January 1994, while at Georgia Tech's Graphics Visualization and Usability Center, Jim pioneered the field of online surveying by creating GVU's World Wide Web User Surveys. This survey provided some of the earliest data on who was using the Web, being among the first to supply data on topics like online commerce, privacy, politics, and the social impact of the Internet. For nearly a decade, the survey material was the most requested research at Georgia Tech and has been widely cited by the popular media, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and CNN. Jim's contribution was featured on the PBS 1996 "Life on the Internet" series.

Jim graduated Cum Laude in Psychology from the University of Colorado in 1993. While there he worked for the Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) and helped prototype the integration of the World Wide Web into NASA's Earth Observing System Distributed Information System (EOSDIS), one of the earliest uses of the Web within NASA.

Jim is acknowledged as a leading experts in the fields of web characterization, information retrieval, and human computer interaction. He has testified before the Federal Trade Commission and United Nations. Jim has served as an advisor to several Internet companies, including WhereOnEarth (acquired by Yahoo!), eGroups (acquired by Yahoo!) and Direct Sights (acquired by Pathfire).

Schedule