Thank you Team Riya

Sorry this is a long post, but worth the bits. Bill Gates is the genius behind Microsoft. Larry behind Oracle. Yang and Filo behind Yahoo. Pierre and Jeff Skoll behind eBay. Larry and Serge behind Google.

I’ve never bought this model of credit. Every company is built by thousands of people.


This is one of the reasons why on the eve of our alpha launch, there are lots of people I want to thank and recognize in chronological order in the building of this company: (BTW I’m sure I forgot someone – if so please forgive me)

• My wife Vijay – who has been patient, supportive, and always pushed me to be a huge success.
  
• My son Deven – everyday no matter how things went at the office, Deven and I laugh and laugh. He has truly brought me happiness and he is already my best friend.
  
• Naval Ravikant – my good friend and the guy I spent 4 months brainstorming ideas with. We went to Korea together over a year ago and shared a window into the future. I still call him for advice and input. He is truly brilliant.
  
• Peter Rip – my investor, my mentor, and the “secret” fourth founder of the company. His support for me allowed this whole venture to happen. To him I owe the greatest depth of gratitude. Some people are investors and some are thought partners. Peter is both. His partners Mark and Pete were key to making the deal happen (ironically at Peter’s Birthday party).
  
• Vineet Buch – The straight man and IIT #1 thinker who forced me to sharpen my focus on the idea of getting people give each other the photos of them. His maturity allowed us to get past some key impasses.
  
• Serge Belongie and David Kriegman two UCSD professors who first told me that this idea was possible (later joined by Prof Malik at Berkeley). Special thanks to Prof Paturi (who made the meetings with David and Serge happen) and to Ming-Hsuan Yang who was invaluable in helping met to find my first co-founder Burak. This feedback was a critical moment after which my focus became 100% on this idea.
  
• Burak Gokturk – my computer vision genius co-founder. Burak is so smart – sometimes I wonder if I even went to school when compared to him. What sets him apart is his drive to succeed. Many Ph’Ds are just thinkers. Burak is a thinker and do-er. He and Azhar, even more than me are the reason this product is getting out the door. Our team of computer vision Ph’Ds was large put together by Burak. Without him we would not have the technology we have.
  
• Azhar Khan – I ‘ve blogged about him a ton, but he is the brick layer that got this built. He is the father of Riya. He is the man who focuses on each bug and drives them to closure. He is the 2nd time entrepreneur I respect. He is the guy I argue with and we make better decisions as a result of it.
  
• John Malloy – John gave us the offer for our first round after 10 slides and held his ground. His is a steady operator who tends to provide stability to our little boat.
  
• Josh Kopelman – Founder of Half.com and angel investor. His product sense is just amazing. All of Josh’s suggestions have been spot on. Of all of the angel investors I know he gets how to build consumers sites. My only regret is not taking even more money from him..;-)
  
• David Hayden – He is the big idea guy. The idea of focusing first on searching for people (instead of first on text) was his idea. Our positioning on the website was mostly his doing. David was with me for five years at Andale as a board member and has always helped me as I dealt with the pressures and pains of being a young CEO.
  
• Ben Lee - Our first employee, college roommate of Azhar, and co-founder of Cubus the first company he and Azhar built. Ben leads our IT operations team. He built our data center and runs all of our servers. He impresses me with his ability to drive production quality out of the engineering team. His understanding of how to do this is better than anyone I’ve worked with in his role.
  
• Kuang-chih Lee – Kuang chih has built most of the face recognition code we use. His quiet brilliance underwrites many parts of the Riya service. Come in on the weekend or in the evenings and most of the time you will find him working. He somehow developed a nickname here, we call him “chilly”.
  
• Diem Vu – He had a choice to join a big search engine or come to us. He chose us. Diem has developed most of the face detection code and also convert many algorithms to production ready code. He is the key glue between our core research and engineering teams.
  
• Vincent Vanhoucke – Vincent just reeks of AI experience. When Vincent begins to dig into a problem he is thorough, methodical, and exacting. He focuses us on key investments which have increased the efficiency of our research process. He developed our text detection and recognition engine almost single handed.
  
• Neelesh Vaikhary – Neelesh is the spice of the office. He has passion and energy. He architected a large part of the server system. The simplicity and quality of his designs are almost unmatched. Neelesh is truly talented.
  
• Dan Chiao – Young, hungry, and driven. Dan is developed the whole front end of our system. All of the Ajax code was written by him. For his interview he wrote a few modules we would need. He has constantly impressed me, over and over again.
  
• Danny Yang – The Renaissance man. Danny developed our core face similarity system and our gender detector. Danny’s interests and contributions range from core researcher to website design to product mgmt. He has had an impact in many areas.
  
• Sandeep Gain – One of the Pillars of our India office. Sandeep used to work with me at Andale. There he was a great engineer who hadn’t have enough opportunity to lead in the past. Here at Riya he has really grown into a real leader. He takes care of so many issues even outside his area. Sandeep’s main technical contribution was in the development of the whole infrastructure for storing and serving our images (not trivial to make fast btw).
  
• Sowmya Karnad – She is one of those people I can always rely on. She runs all of the logistics and operations for our India office. She worked with me at Andale and has always come through for me. Rarely in business can you say this about someone. She is insightful and dedicated.
  
• Nikhil Pal Singh – He wrote all of the middleware to connect our face recognition technology to Dan’s front end. The main functionality you interact with when doing face recognition, training, and tagging are mostly things he built. With Sandeep he is really on the leaders of the India office. He is sure and steady and helps keep the team on track.
  
• Piyush Partani – Developed our core addressbook and visual signature sharing functionality. Piyush used to work with me at Andale and is probably one of the most dedicated employees we have at Riya. He works longer and harder than almost anyone.
  
• Nitin Agarwal – When you download and install our client you are using Nitin’s code. He is our main windows and client side developer. He is a second time entrepreneur from IIT who is obsessed with quality. His code tends to work on the first try and he is truly upset if you even find 1 bug with his code.
  
• Vineet Bhardwaj – Wrote most of our Java code we use in the client to interact with the service. The first time I met him, he rode his motorcyle through a monsoon to make it to my interview. The three other interviews I had that day canceled. He arrived soaking wet, but impressed me that day.
  
• Ginto Mathew - Ginto is the guy who held together our IT operations at Andale. You could not ask for a better IT manager. I still remember the extreme leadership and courage he showed at Andale that made up promote him many times. At Riya we are just entering Ginto's sweet spot which only happens once we have launched the service. I know he will keep the servers running.
  
• Uma Shankar – The man behind the look and feel of our site. Uma’s designs are clean and simple. I am a big fan of his work. He works tirelessly and has redisgned some pages 10 times before we launched them in Alpha.
  
• Tara Hunt – Tara is our only marketing person and our main blogger. I hired her because of her blog. She has been getting the word out and doing a great job at this.
  
• Dragomir Anguelov – Drago is responsible for the largest increase we’ve seen in recognition rates. How did he do it, well that is a secret, but his core algorithmic improvement is nothing short of astonishing. When I first interviewed Drago I thought this guy is really smart now I know it is true.
  
• Krishna Prasad – Is new to the company and just joined us. He is working on the next generation of our text recognition system and comes to us from IBM Research. I am excited about what he can do.
  
• Mario Feegrade – Our most recent hire is a guy is the first guy I hired in India for Andale. Mario is nothing short of a rockstar (he also plays in a band btw ;). He used to run customer service for Andale and now has come here to do the same. I trust him fully and more importantly trust him with my customers.
  
• Shel Israel – Shel is a consultant for us. He is the one who got me to blog and introduced me to the blogosphere. Shel is the mastermind (he is scary smart btw) behind our PR efforts who came up with the simple strategy of “blog what you are thinking and be real – typos and all”. Definitely one of my favorite guys.

There are many more who helped to make this happen … please give these guys the hand for getting us to here. This is truly a great team of people.

Comments

[andy tovar]

"Larry and Serge behind Google. "

genius, please check your spelling of Serge...it should be Sergey.