Barney Pell (born March 18, 1968, in
Hollywood,
California) was co-founder and CEO of Powerset. Pell received his
Bachelor of Science degree in symbolic systems from
Stanford University in 1989, where he graduated
Phi Beta Kappa and was a
National Merit Scholar. Pell received a
PhD in
computer science from
Cambridge University in 1993, where he was a
Marshall Scholar. He has worked at
NASA, as chief strategist and vice president of business development at StockMaster.com (acquired by
Red Herring in March, 2000) and at Whizbang! Labs. Prior to joining Powerset, Pell was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at
Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Pell is also a founder of
Moon Express, Inc., a U.S. company awarded a $10M commercial lunar contract by NASA and a competitor in the
Google Lunar X PRIZE.
Steve Newcomb was the COO and co-founder of Powerset. Prior to joining Powerset, he was a co-founder of Loudfire, General Manager at Promptu, and was on the board of directors at
Jaxtr. He left Powerset in October 2007 to form Virgance, a social startup incubator.
Lorenzo Thione (born in
Como, Italy) was the product architect and co-founder of Powerset. Prior to joining Powerset, he worked at
FXPAL Ryan Ferrier is a member of the founding team of Powerset. He managed personnel and internal operations. After 2008 he went on to co-found Serious Business, which made Facebook applications and was later bought by
Zynga. Another Powerset alumnus,
Alex Le, became CTO of Serious Business and went on to become an executive producer at
Zynga when it bought the company.
Siqi Chen founded a stealth startup in mobile computing after leaving Powerset.
Tom Preston-Werner worked at Powerset and left after the acquisition to found GitHub. ==Investors==