Bates graduated from
Holland Christian High School in 1994 and received a
Bachelor's degree in History and Biology from
Hope College in 1998. Malda and Bates created Slashdot in 1997, while undergraduates at Hope College. In 1999 they sold the site to
Andover.net, which was acquired by
VA Linux Systems in 2000 (which became
SourceForge, Inc. in 2007, then
Geeknet, Inc. in 2009). Bates served as Director of Media Operations for Geeknet from May 2001 through July 2004, when he became Vice President of Editorial Operations and Executive Editor of Slashdot. In February 2008 he became Geeknet's Vice President of Platform and managed the core engineering and product teams for Slashdot,
freshmeat, and
SourceForge. In August 2011, Bates joined
Google. He worked at Google as Chief of Staff for the CIO, and as of 2019, is the Chief of Product Operations. ==Slashdot==