COFOUNDER | EXECUTIVE VP of PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

In September 1996 Dan Pelson & I founded Bolt, a social networking (back then it was called "community") site for over 9 million 15-24 year old members. I left at the end of 2002, but it still existed until 14 August 2007, although in my opinion, as a shadow of its former self in the last few years, as the new owner ran it into the ground. Anyway, we had an unbelievably talented, intense, creative and seriously fun staff, and were just a bit ahead of our time. We had our members creating all the content on the site, making videos of themselves, and even designing and voting on t-shirts that we would produce all the way back in 1999.

I oversaw the Strategy, Content, Design, Technology & Community Moderation teams, about 90 people in early 2002. Informally I also worked with the HR team to encourage a strong sense of loyalty and cooperation across the company as a whole, and most especially between the creative teams and Sales/Business Development. My Strategy group worked extremely hard to translate the needs of our teen members into extremely "sticky" applications, tools and member-generated content features that would also make potential advertisers happy and keep the company profitable.

We launched versions of Bolt in the UK, Australia and Canada in addition to the orginal US site, and ran small offices in each of those locations. We created a mobile version of Bolt in 2000, since at the time phones were more ubiquitous than internet connections outside the US.