The NorthScale Team

James Phillips, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer. A twenty-five year veteran of the software industry, James Phillips started his career writing software for the Apple II and TRS-80 microcomputer platforms. In 1984, at age 17, he co-founded his first software company, Fifth Generation Systems, which was acquired by Symantec in 1993 forming the foundation of Symantec's PC backup software business. Most recently, James was co-founder and CEO of Akimbi Systems, a venture-backed software company acquired by VMware in 2006. Book-ended by these entrepreneurial successes, James has held executive leadership roles in software engineering, product management, marketing and corporate development at large public companies including Intel, Synopsys and Intuit and with venture-backed software startups including Central Point Software (acquired by Symantec), Ensim and Actional Corporation (acquired by Progress Software). Additionally, James spent two years as a technology investment banker with PaineWebber and Robertson Stephens and Co., delivering M&A advisory services to software companies. James holds a BS in Mathematics and earned his MBA, with honors, from the University of Chicago. He currently serves on the board of directors of Teneros and as an investor in and advisor to a number of privately-held software companies including Delphix, Replay Solutions and Virsto.

Blog: http://blog.northscale.com
Twitter: @northscale

Dustin Sallings, Co-Founder and Chief Architect. Dustin is a core committer for memcached, and the creator and maintainer of spymemcached, the high-performance memcached client for Java. Previously, Dustin was half of the Beyond.com performance engineering team and core developer of the Beyond.com ecommerce engine. Later, he was the lead engineer responsible for scaling 2Wire’s device network infrastructure enabling it to manage and monitor millions of distributed devices, while simultaneously supporting the continuous addition of features to the system.

Blog and projects: http://dustin.github.com/
Twitter: @dlsspy

Steve Yen, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer. Steve is a world-class technologist and successful entrepreneur with a track record of founding and building groundbreaking companies. Prior to NorthScale, Steve co-founded Escalate, and architected its unique, multitenant e-commerce and order management software-as-a-service application. Escalate was acquired by GE Retail Systems in 2004. Previously, Steve co-founded Kiva Software, where he was a key part of the technology team that created the world’s first application server with high-scale deployments at E*Trade, Bank of America and Sabre. Kiva was acquired by Netscape in 1997. Steve is a UC Berkeley Computer Science graduate.

Blog: http://blog.northscale.com/

Matt Ingenthron, Staff Engineer and Manager of Developer Relations. Matt is an experienced web architect with a software development background. Prior to NorthScale, he worked for Sun Microsystems as a Principal Technologist where he worked with some of the largest web properties in the United States, China, Japan and Korea as a member of Sun’s global field organization. Matt has deep expertise in building, scaling and operating global-scale Java, Ruby on Rails and AMP web applications by leveraging a variety of open source projects, including memcached.

Blog: http://blogs.ingenthron.org/matt/
Twitter: @ingenthr

Patrick Galbraith, Staff Engineer. Patrick is the maintainer of the Perl open-source DBD driver for MySQL and Drizzle; the MySQL user data functions for memcached; and the FederatedX MySQL storage engine. He recently authored Wiley-published book Developing Web Applications with Apache, MySQL, memcached, and Perl. He is the creator and key contributor to the Narada search engine project which harnesses open source technologies including Drizzle, Sphinx, gearmand, memcached, Apache and Perl/PHP/Java.

Blog: http://capttofu.livejournal.com/
Twitter: @capttofu

Rod Ebrahimi, Product Manager. Rod has worked at the intersection of business and technology since 1998 where he started his career at Netscape Communications. His broad experience and areas of expertise include scalable Internet infrastructure design and user-centric software and product development. Rod has a real passion for the application of technologies to solve challenging business and social problems. Rod holds a Bachelor of Science, with distinction and departmental honors, in Cognitive Science specializing in Human-Computer Interaction.

Blog: http://innovatebig.com/
Twitter: @innovatebig