Board of Directors
Will Harvey, Co-Founder and Chairman
Will (avatar "Will") co-founded IMVU in April 2004 and served as President and CEO from its inception to November, 2007. He is currently founder and CEO of the FINALE | Fireworks project. Prior to IMVU, Will founded two other companies: There.com, which makes the virtual world used by MTV and other consumer brands, and Sandcastle, a networking tools company acquired by Adobe Systems. In high school and college, Will wrote some of the early top selling video games and creativity products. At age 16, Will wrote Music Construction Set, the world's first word processor for music, published by Electronic Arts. Will holds five patents on networking, search and computer graphics.
Will earned a B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Outside of work, Will serves on the Board of Trustees of Nueva Day School, an elementary school for the gifted and talented. In his spare time, Will is competing actively in Ironman triathlons and studying the strategy game of Go.
Shawn Carolan, Managing Director, Menlo Ventures
Shawn (avatar "stc") joined Menlo Ventures in 2002, and he has focused primarily on connected software and services. Before joining Menlo, Shawn was a management consultant for Booz-Allen & Hamilton, after spending most of his career in software development and engineering management positions. Shawn was Manager of Software Architecture for Open Port Technology, a start-up that created Internet-based messaging software for data carriers. Prior to that, Shawn worked at Motorola's Cellular Infrastructure Group and Wireless Data Group, Sprint PCS, and the University of Illinois' Center for Computational Electromagnetics.
Shawn earned a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Champaign and an M.B.A. from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Outside of work, Shawn enjoys soccer, snowboarding, and time with his wife and kids.
Spencer Tall, Managing Director, Allegis Capital
Spencer joined Allegis Capital in 2004. Previously, Spencer was a co-founder and General Partner with APV Technology Partners for three funds over 10 years. In addition, Spencer is a co-founder of Asia Pacific Ventures, a consulting and advisory service firm where, over a 13-year period, he assisted more than 50 technology companies in their Asia expansion plans. This included technology licensing, fund raising and distribution arrangements. Spencer has acted as a strategic advisor to global companies including Motorola, Sony, Fujitsu, Samsung, Canon, TDK and Dacom. Prior to founding APV, Spencer, a fluent Japanese speaker, oversaw US sales operations for Marubun Corporation, a Japan-based billion-dollar components trading company. He also worked as a sales manager with GRE America, Inc., a Japanese contract manufacturer, serving U.S. corporations' outsourcing efforts. Spencer serves on the boards of IMVU, Allegiance, Symplified, and AvaLAN Wireless.
Spencer earned a B.S. in Political Science and Japanese from Brigham Young University.
Kuk Yi, Managing Director, Best Buy Capital
Kuk joined Best Buy, the leading global retailer of consumer technology products and services, in 2004. As the Managing Director of Best Buy Capital, the venture investment team of Best Buy, Kuk is responsible for leading all the investment activities to create a portfolio of opportunities for Best Buy's growth, while encouraging the adoption of new technologies, solutions and services for the consumer technology ecosystem. Kuk was previously a founding member of Best Buy's corporate development team, where he was responsible for supporting strategic transactions, including acquisitions and investments. Prior to Best Buy, Kuk was a Senior Investment Manager at Samsung, based in Korea, and a Senior Associate at ABN AMRO Capital.
Kuk earned a B.S. in Finance from the University of Maryland at College Park.
Outside of work, Kuk enjoys spending time with his family while dreaming of ways to move back to his childhood home in Hawaii.
Karen Edwards, Independent IMVU Board Member
Karen serves as an independent director of the IMVU board, and brings a wealth of experience marketing consumer brands. She was the 17th employee and the head of marketing for Yahoo for about six years, and the founding CMO for Glam Inc. and Common Sense Media. Currently, she serves on the board of the Institute for the Future; her prior board experience includes 2Wire, RedEnvelope (when public), Our Pictures and several non-profit boards. Earlier in her career, she held management roles at Twentieth Century Fox, Clorox and BBDO Advertising for Apple Computer.
She earned her BA at Stanford University and MBA at Harvard. She enjoys social networking, paddleboarding, and DIY projects.
Robert Chaplinsky, General Partner, Bridgescale Partners, IMVU Board Observer
Rob is a co-founder of Bridgescale Partners and brings more than 10 years of venture capital investing experience and more than 15 years of marketing experience to technology companies. Prior to forming Bridgescale, Rob spent seven years as a general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV) where he focused on investments in the semiconductor and communications markets. At MDV, Rob was the lead investor and board member in companies such as Accelerant Networks (acquired by Synopsys) Brion Technologies (acquired by ASML) Cooligy (acquired by Emerson Electric) Pivotal Technologies (acquired by Broadcom) Pixim Technologies and Quake Technologies (acquired by AMCC). Before joining MDV, Rob was a lead technology research analyst at Hambrecht & Quist. In that capacity, Rob led investment research on some of the industry's most dynamic public and private semiconductors in the United States and Asia. During that time, Rob also made personal investments in successful private companies including FormFactor (NASDAQ: FORM) Galileo (sold to Marvell) Netboost (sold to Intel) and Quantum Effect Design (sold to PMC Sierra). Prior to Hambrecht & Quist, Rob spent seven years at Intel Corporation in various senior marketing and sales positions.
Rob earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Eric Ries, Co-Founder and IMVU Board Observer
Eric (avatar "Eric") co-founded IMVU in April, 2004 and served as Chief Technology Officer from its inception to August, 2008. A highly sought-after speaker, Eric is the author of several books including The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (Crown Business, 2011). Eric also served as entrepreneur-in-residence at the Harvard Business School and Venture Advisor at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. While an undergraduate at Yale University, Eric co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Eric continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. In 2007, BusinessWeek.com named Eric one of the Tech's Best Young Entrepreneurs.
Eric earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University.
Eric serves on the advisory board of many technology startups including pbWiki, Bunchball, SpeedDate, illumobile, BlueBet and KaChing.
Brett (avatar "Brett") joined IMVU in August 2005 as Vice President of Operations. In 2008 he became responsible for all technical functions in the company and served as Senior Vice President Engineering & Operations. Prior to IMVU, Brett was General Manager for the virtual world at There.com, after serving as its Director of Engineering and later as its VP of Operations. Prior to There.com, Brett co-founded and was CEO of Asylum Entertainment, a game development company. Brett led Asylum to develop 20 game titles over a 5-year period before selling the company to a software publisher.
James (avatar "James") joined IMVU in January 2006 as a Software Engineer. Previously, James served as Senior Program Manager of Software Engineering at Bargain Network. Prior to that, he was Director at There.com, responsible for technical design, creative design and GUI web applications content for consumer applications.
Kevin (avatar "Ahojthere") joined IMVU in July 2007 as Director of International Business Development. Prior to IMVU, Kevin spent over a decade with Adobe Systems, where he held a variety of sales, sales operations and product development roles. While based in Asia with Adobe, Kevin opened the company's offices in Hong Kong, Taipei and Beijing. Later he moved to Sydney, Australia where he held an Asia-Pacific wide sales management role. While in Hong Kong, Kevin also served as the Asia sales manager for a relational database firm, and he spent several years with an IT consulting firm (acquired by Gartner).
Mike (avatar "smithtahoe") joined IMVU in December 2009 as Senior Director of People and Talent. Mike now leads all human resources, staffing and facilities at IMVU. Prior to IMVU, Mike held global staffing and HR roles with WebEx, Cisco Systems, Google, Tesla Motors and Tonic. Prior to running internal corporate staffing and HR functions, Mike held a vice president role in the executive and engineering search space with Modis (now Adecco) growing its largest region ($110 million) from 1998-2004. Previously, Mike launched his own consulting company, and clients included Amazon.com, Facebook, and Netflix. At IMVU, Mike helped create such a positive culture that the company was selected as one of the Best Places to Work in The Bay Area by the San Francisco Business times in both 2010 and 2011.
Matt (avatar "Matt") co-founded IMVU in April 2004 as Senior Art Director. Matt oversees all creative, user experience and design functions, and was initially responsible for creating IMVU's avatars and virtual environments. In fact, Matt is the original creator of IMVU's wonderfully expressive yet highly customizable avatars. Matt is also a key leader of the Content Creator program, IMVU's proprietary, user-generated content system. Prior to IMVU, Matt served as lead concept artist, then Kinetic Art Director, at There.com. Matt's work at There.com, where he was responsible for everything that moved in its virtual world (avatars, pets, vehicles) laid the foundation for There.com to earn an Emmy award in 2007. Matt began his career as a classically trained illustrator and writer in New York City.
Jon (avatar "jwatte") joined IMVU in 2009 as a technical director. Previously, Jon was Chief Technology Officer of virtual world platform Forterra System, providing technical direction to the engineering team as well as strategic direction to the entire company. Prior to joining Forterra, Jon was Engineering Director at Be Incorporated with overall responsibility for architecture and delivery of the BeOS media, data translation, and selected kernel subsystems.
Stewart Bonn joined IMVU in October, 2014. An interactive entertainment pioneer, Stewart helped turn computer games into a business as one of Electronic Arts' first employees and the General Manager of EA Studios. Recently, Stewart served as Chief Product Officer of If You Can, a publisher of educational games that improves a child's emotional intelligence. He also has served as CEO of AnyRiver Entertainment, VP of Fun at There.com and VP Talent at Bix.com. A lifelong Bay Area resident, Stewart earned a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
