Adam Rifkin

Experience

• Co-founder, Panda, and Whale at PandaWhale

  106 Miles is a Bay area cocktail party for technical founders and our groupies. We party several times a month in Palo Alto, Redwood City, and San Francisco.
  
  Now the members of 106 Miles want to bring our cocktail party online.
  
  PandaWhale is writing the software to make that happen:
  http://ifindkarma.posterous.com/pandawhale-frequently-asked-questions
  
  
  Our mantras at PandaWhale are simple:
  
  1. Save the pandas.
  2. Save the whales.
  3. Save the Web!
  
  On that last point, we love HTTP and trust HTTP. To learn more about saving the Web, see: http://scienti

  • January 2011 - Present

• Mixmaster and Supafly Tastemak at 106 Miles

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  • I co-lead a networking group to educate and empower entrepreneurial engineers in Silicon Valley:
    
    http://meetup.com/106miles
    http://twitter.com/106miles
    http://facebook.com/106miles
    
    
    Note that Meetup is 106 Miles' new format as of August 2010.
    
    Consider this 106 Miles two point oh: Faster, More Fun, and now with More Networking! (What we engineers call "Drinking" is what business people call "Networking".)
    
    
    
    We have a mixer 6-9pm on the first Wednesday of every month at Bistro 412 at 412 Emerson in scenic downtown Palo Alto, CA.
    
    We have a mixer 6-9pm

    • January 2005 - Present

• Co-founder, Director, and CEO at Renkoo

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  • Renkoo developed consumer Internet applications on Facebook and MySpace. Our applications Haikoo Zoo, Booze Mail, Warbots, Car Show, Drinkies, Club Land, Alumnik, Volunteer, and the Renkoo Social Planner were enjoyed by more than 36 million people between 2007 and 2009.
    
    Renkoo was backed in part by Silicon Valley angels, and in part by $9 million in venture capital financing from investors Matrix Partners and Maveron LLC.
    
    We sold and/or shut down all of Renkoo's applications in June 2009, and spent the summer shutting down the rest of the company's ser

    • May 2005 - September 2009

• Co-founder, Director, and CTO at KnowNow

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  • I left Caltech to start KnowNow, an enterprise software company started with Rohit Khare to provide real-time web applications to Fortune 500 companies.
    
    The core product was a Publish-and-Subscribe Server with Web interfaces, using HTTP and HTTPS to cross organizational firewalls, and a JavaScript library that could be easily embedded in any browser application to make it "real time" five years before AJAX and COMET existed.
    
    We were ever-so-slightly ahead of our time. ;)
    
    KnowNow was funded by angels and over $50 million in venture capital from Kleiner

    • November 1999 - December 2008

• Research Manager at Microsoft

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  • Research and development in Internet-Scale Event-Driven Architectures -- and, in particular, real-time web-based applications. Microsoft sponsored my fellowship at Caltech, and employed me at the Redmond campus with the Systems and Networking research group.

    • January 1998 - November 1999

• Research Associate at Hewlett Packard

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  • Research and development in Internet-Scale Event-Driven Architectures. Worked in the eSpeak/eServices group, part of HP Labs.

    • April 1996 - October 1996