Team

Joe Hyrkin CEO

Joe currently serves as the President and CEO of Wordnik. He has more than 18 years of experience in general management, and in senior sales and business development management both domestically and internationally. He has focused his career on creating and launching new businesses in the US and Asia, and has been instrumental in pioneering creative revenue opportunities in the community and social web space.

In 2010, Joe completed a role as an Entrepreneur in Residence with Trinity Ventures. While at Trinity, Joe spent six months focused on opportunities in next-generation social commerce, community, crowdsourcing, and social media and evaluated more than 150 companies.

Prior to joining Trinity as an EIR, Joe was the Senior Vice President of Sales and Business Development at Gaia Interactive. While there, Joe oversaw all revenue including virtual goods, advertising/sponsorship and merchandise as well as all Business Development efforts including fundraising, strategic partnerships, and content acquisition and distribution.

Prior to Gaia Online, Joe headed up the business side of Multimedia Search at Yahoo!, where he also served as head of Business Development and Sales for Flickr. Before his time at Yahoo, Joe served as Vice President of Strategic Accounts and Asia Pacific Operations at Virage Inc., a provider of video search and publishing services and software. While at Virage, Joe and his team established some of the first business relationships in the broadband entertainment space, working with many of the world's leading media companies. Prior to Virage, he headed sales for Sina.com, the top Chinese language portal, and before that Joe ran The Economist Group's business in China for four and a half years, establishing the company's presence in the country and overseeing offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Joe serves on the Board Of Directors of Viximo, Inc., and on the advisory boards of Bunndle, Inc., RadiumOne, Inc., TaskRabbit, and Zoodles Inc.

Erin McKean Founder

Before starting Wordnik, Erin McKean was editor in chief for American Dictionaries at Oxford University Press. She is the editor of the irregularly-published recreational-linguistics journal VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly, and the author of Weird and Wonderful Words, More Weird and Wonderful Words, Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, and That's Amore (also about words), as well as the novel The Secret Lives of Dresses. She has served on the board of the Dictionary Society of North America and on the editorial board for its journal, Dictionaries, as well as on the editorial board for the journal of the American Dialect Society, American Speech. She also serves on the advisory boards of the Credo Reference and the Dictionary of American Regional English. She has a A.B./A.M. in linguistics from the University of Chicago. She rants about dresses on her blog (A Dress A Day, listed as one of the top fifty fashion blogs online by FashionIQ), and is disconcertingly bad at Scrabble (but surprisingly good at roller-skating). She can be reached at erin@wordnik.com.

Roger McNamee Executive Chairman

Roger McNamee is a founder of Elevation Partners, a longtime luminary of the Silicon Valley investment world, and the rhythm guitarist for the Bay Area band Moonalice.

Tony Tam CTO, Technical Co-Founder

Tony is the Chief Technical Officer and technical co-founder of Wordnik, where he leads development efforts of the site's innovative word navigation system. He is a member of the MongoDB Masters group and has lead the Swagger API Framework open-source initiative. Prior to joining Wordnik, he was a founder and SVP of Engineering at Think Passenger, a provider of customer collaboration software. Before that, he was lead engineer at Composite Software where he helped develop the company's first- and second-generation query processing engines and led the research and implementation of their patented cost-based federated query optimizer. He also led software development in the bioinformatics group at Galileo Labs, a drug-discovery company based in the Silicon Valley. Tony received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from UC Santa Barbara and his MBA from Santa Clara University. He can be reached at tony@wordnik.com.

Rami Habal VP Product

Rami comes to Wordnik from cloud security leader Proofpoint, where he was an early employee and instrumental in growing the business to an IPO filing, holding various product and marketing roles. Prior to Proofpoint, Rami held positions at Mohr Davidow Ventures, Cisco, Hughes Electronics and several startups. Rami has also cofounded 2 non-profits, started 3 businesses and serves as an advisor to early stage startups in Silicon Valley. In addition to an MBA from MIT and an MPA from Harvard, Rami has a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia. Rami is passionate about form+function, the post-pc mobile hypernet, discovering new things, Moleskine notebooks and jazz. Follow him on Twitter at @rhabal. He can be reached at rami@wordnik.com.

Tiger Lan VP Engineering

Tiger Lan is a seasoned technology veteran with expertise in large-scale web software development and operations. His mantra is "Ship it!" Tiger has successfully built up strong and talented engineering teams at Reputation.com as CTO and VPE and at Plaxo as Head of Development, and his focus has always been on developing entrepreneurial developers in an engineering-driven company culture. Tiger holds a BS in Computer Science from Tsinghua University in Beijing China and an MS in Computer Science from Michigan State University. He can be reached at tiger@wordnik.com.

Ramesh Pidikiti Director of Engineering

Ramesh was VP of Engineering at Passenger. Passenger’s social business software powers private online communities for the world's leading marketers and Fortune 100 brands. At passenger Ramesh was responsible for all of development, technical support and QA. He was one of the first engineers to join the team and played major role in design and development of their platform.

Prior to Passenger he worked as Sr. Development manager at Certus Software. He was the second engineer at Certus and helped build their enterprise corporate governance platform.

Prior to Certus he worked as senior consultant at HCL, one of the leading companies in India, where he executed many projects in India, Signapore and US.

He can be reached at ramesh@wordnik.com

Jeanfrançois Arcand Senior Architect

Jeanfrançois has been working in software engineering for the last 18 years. He studied pure mathematics and worked for a Canadian research centre, doing mathematical modeling in C++ until someone introduced him to a new language called Java. He never stopped using it.

Jeanfrançois worked for Sun Microsystems for almost 10 years where he first participated in the Tomcat works donated by Sun, adding XML support and an improved security mechanism. He was also an active member of the Jakarta Digester project. He then wrote one of the first NIO frameworks, Grizzly, which was originally targeted to replace the Tomcat Coyote Connector in GlassFish, but evolved into its own framework and is now used by thousands of applications.

Jeanfrançois also developed the Grizzly Comet Framework, which was an early way to implement asynchronous web applications. He then started the Atmosphere Framework, which brings portability across Servlet container and allows the creation of WebSocket and Comet applications. He is still leading and actively developing the framework.

Jeanfrançois was also an active member of the GlassFish Application Server, focusing on the WebContainer parts. He then started designing a simple but powerful microkernel used by GlassFish v3, allowing frameworks like Play!, Jersey, etc. to be easily added without the need for Servlet container. Jeanfrançois is still the number two user (in terms of total email count) of the Glassfish user mailing list He also created, with the help of Brian McCallister, the newly asynchronous http client called AHC, used by thousands of applications like Maven, Apache Camel, Play! etc., and is still leading that community. He wrote (with Jason Val Zyl) an open source framework called RestSimple, RestSimple is a REST framework supporting Sitebricks and Jersey and is available as open source.

He can be reached at jfarcand@wordnik.com

Kumanan Rajamanikkam Lead Engineer

Kumanan was principal engineer at Composite Software of San Mateo, California, where he worked on indexing, searching, and a federated query engine. Prior to that he worked as senior software engineer at Elance.com on a product which does services procurement and management. He loves to play and watch cricket, and to play board games such as Settlers of Catan. He can be reached at kumanan@wordnik.com.

Angela Tung Communications

Angela holds an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University and a BA in English from Barnard College. She has a background in publishing, marketing, and corporate communications. But mostly she just writes stuff. She can be reached at angela@wordnik.com.

Krishna Vemuri Lead Corpus Engineer

Krishna was lead engineer at Think Passenger, where he was responsible for building new features, improving the overall architecture, and maintaining the product. Prior to that he was an engineering manager at Evite.com, where he led the software development group. He has an MS in Software Engineering from Golden Gate University in San Francisco, and a Bachelor's in Engineering in Computer Science. He can be reached at krishna@wordnik.com.

Robert Voyer Computational Linguist

Robert Voyer came to Wordnik from Powerset, via Microsoft. He has an AB in French literature and an MS in computer science from the University of Chicago. He can be reached at robert@wordnik.com.

Will Fitzgerald Lead, Analytics Platform

Will was a senior research development engineer for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. He joined Microsoft as part of their acquisition of Powerset and their semantic search engine, where he was in the first round of employees. While at Powerset, Will led the development of their lexical server—a kind of Wordnik light—and spent a lot of time tuning models to find references to people, places, and organizations.

Prior to Bing and Powerset, Will helped build an autonomous helicopter for NASA, led some translation projects at Canada’s National Research Council, taught computer science, built dialog systems for NASA and others. He got his PhD from Northwestern University at the Institute for the Learning Sciences, where he researched building semantic dialog systems for embedding in educational tools.

Will proudly evidences the Northern Cities Shift, likes to sing loudly and is an editor of The Trumpet, a thrice-annual periodical for singers and writers of dispersed harmony and fasola music. Based on a statistical analysis of his writings, his favorite word is “the”. He can be reached at will@wordnik.com.

Colin Pollock Computational Linguist

Colin came to Wordnik from Powerset, and is a graduate of UC Santa Cruz. He likes snow, crossword puzzles, and air hockey. Air hockey likes him, too. He can be reached at colin@wordnik.com.

Russell Horton Computational Linguist

Russell just transplanted his avocado farm from St. Paul, Minnesota, to La Jolla, California, where he is thrilled to be a doctoral student in computational linguistics at UCSD. Before that, he has been an acolyte of the ARTFL Project Project at the University of Chicago since early in his undergraduate days there (AB Linguistics 2002). At ARTFL he worked on text search and retrieval, machine learning and data mining for humanities applications, and automated discovery of textual reuse across vast corpora. When he's not niking words or teaching computers to nik them, he likes to be on, in or under the water. He has seen a beaked whale breach and expose its flukes, which is unattested in the literature. In many languages, the typographical "at symbol" @ is called by that language's word for "monkey". He can be reached at russ@wordnik.com.

Alex Le Senior UI Engineer

Alex fell in love with Ruby on Rails at an airport and it was love at first sight. During the day he's a Rails/JavaScript guy, but at night he's helping people getting married happily with his wedding planning tools site Marrily.com. While not working, he likes chilling, reading, Netflixing, browsing HackerNews, and playing his piano. He can be reached at alex@wordnik.com.

Aaron Hans Front-end Engineer

Aaron Hans likes to creates silly things like a punching bag that controls music playback and find nearby graffiti. In a perverse mood one day he wrote some bad advice for front end developers at howtomakebrowserscry.wordpress.com/. In the past he has been paid to build websites or native applications by Electronic Arts, Yahoo and IGN and may be found kiteboarding in the bay when not behind the keyboard.

He can be reached at aaron@wordnik.com

Gregg Carrier Senior Server Engineer

Gregg joins us as a Senior Server Engineer and comes to us from DreamWorks Animation, where he worked on core service infrastructure for their next generation of animation tools. Gregg has also taught community college CS classes, beertended in the Anderson Valley, worked at a winery, was a park ranger at Shenandoah National Park, and has been a ski instructor.

In his non-server-engineering time, Gregg homebrews (and has for 18 years!), loves scuba diving, hiking, and camping (and is waiting for his two little boys to get big enough to do those things, too). He also plays the ukulele and spins glow poi. Gregg (the extra ‘g’ is for ‘great’) can be reached at gregg@wordnik.com.

Jim Hao Server Engineer

Jim has worked in the software industry for more than 10 years. As his interests shifted from artificial intelligence/machine learning to programming methodology, he moved from the campus to Silicon Valley, and has been coding in C/C++ and Java for web applications. Recently he's been interested in and working in Scala and PHP.

Jim came to Wordnik from Reputation.com, where he was the engineering manager of platform team. Before that he worked for both big companies (including Visa, Shutterfly, Ebay and Peoplesoft) and for web startups.

Jim holds a Ph.D degree in CS from Tsinghua University, Beijing, and a MS in CS from Oregon State University. Outside work, Jim likes to run and hike, and has finished four full marathons, two Rim2Rim races, Mt Whitney, and C2C. His new challenges include qualifying for the Boston Marathon, R3, and Kilimanjaro.

He can be reached at jim@wordnik.com

Thomas Haymore Product Manager

Thomas is a Ph.D/J.D. candidate at Stanford University, where he was the Editor-in-Chief and CEO of the Stanford Law Review. When he’s not wrangling the intersection of product and engineering, he likes to make delicious gluten-free baked goods, temper some high-quality chocolate, goof off with his adorable sons, or indulge in his hobby, competitive Esperanto Haiku Yodeling.

Thomas can be reached at thomas@wordnik.com.

Beatrice Bernard Executive Admin/Office Manager

Beatrice has been instrumental in building and optimizing the office and process infrastructure for numerous start-up companies across Silicon Valley. Most recently she was at Criteo, an advertising re-targeting company, where she successfully managed all aspects of several company moves as the team grew from 0 to 80 US employees (450 worldwide). While working for the French-based company she was able to hone her language skills to interact with corporate HQ as well as better understand jokes told by the French expats and interns.

Beatrice has held similar positions at Habeas, Flowpoint/Efficient Networks, and a few others, in all cases handling whatever needed to be done to facilitate the growth and expansion of those companies. Born and raised in Switzerland (although she does not ski or yodel), she brings to each job a passion, commitment, and attention to detail that have been key to her career success over the years. In her spare time, she tries to stay healthy and likes to hike, do yoga, read, and is slightly obsessed with Sudoku (but her real passion is adventure travel). She can be reached at beatrice@wordnik.com.