Dave Sifry

Summary

Dave is a veteran entrepreneur and leader, specializing in software product development and engineering. He has started and built 9 companies both venture-backed and bootstrapped, ranging from productivity systems, mobile apps, enterprise software, linux services, wireless, blog search, Generative AI, and digital health. He’s taken that experience and brought it into leadership positions at Interana, Lyft, and Reddit, where he combined his engineering management chops with user-centered product design to help create innovative products that have affected the lives of millions of users. In 2020, he took his experience to the Anti-Defamation League, where he led its Center for Technology and Society, both deeply engaging with and holding accountable tech companies to mitigate, ameliorate, and attenuate online hate and harassment. A results-driven executive, he believes deeply in building systems of trust and accountability to scale organizations. As an entrepreneur, Dave created Technorati, and served as CEO for the first 5 years of Technorati's lifetime, and then on its board until Technorati's successful sale. He was co-founder and CTO of Sputnik, where he directed the engineering of all Sputnik products, including its WiFi security and management products, the AP120 and Sputnik Central Control. Prior to that he was co-founder, CTO, and VP of Engineering at Linuxcare, Inc., where he built Linuxcare's services infrastructure, including its managed services business, a Linux-based, managed-server technology and service for xSPs. Dave is a regular speaker on leadership, user-centered product development, blogs, and the massive changes in the digital media environment. In 2007 and 2009, Dave was selected by the World Economic Forum to participate in its Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland as a WEF Technology Pioneer. He served on the founding board of Linux International and has served as an investor, advisor, and mentor to a number of companies, including Metavent, Causes, Mozilla, Xola.com, MeetingQ, and Merchant Atlas. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. Dave's hobbies include travel and astrophotography, and he speaks Japanese in a rusty kansai-ben. He lives in San Francisco, CA. Specialties: Generative AI, Product development, Building and scaling high-tech businesses, venture capital funding, technology due diligence, crafting product vision, consumer internet UX, building scalable service architectures, building and leading great teams, and getting the job done.