Medio™ - Mobile Search and Advertising Leader

Bill Bryant

Co-founder and Advisory Chair

William K. (Bill) Bryant has had early and instrumental involvement in over twenty leading software and Internet companies, serving variously as a founder, senior executive, investor and board member. Before he recently joined Mobile Operandi as CEO, Bryant was a partner with Atlas Venture, a large international venture capital firm with $2.5 billion under management, where he originated an investment in Isilon Systems (http://www.isilon.com). Prior to Atlas, Bryant was a co-founder of Qpass, where he served as CEO and later Chairman. He also co-founded and served as president of Netbot, Inc., which built the first comparison shopping agent for the Internet, Jango.

In the early 1990s, Bryant was the founding Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Visio Corporation (now part of Microsoft Corporation). He was an early investor and board member in seven companies that were acquired or went public, including Loudeye, AEI Music (DMX/Liberty Media), Viafone (Extended Systems), Teamplate (Captaris), Exstatic Software (Xchange Applications), Throw (Excite) and Singing Fish (Thomson). In addition, Bryant consulted extensively for Microsoft Corporation, RealNetworks, Getty Images, and Corbis. Earlier in his career, he held VP Marketing and GM roles for Micrografx, Software Publishing and Traveling Software.

Bryant is currently on the Board of three software companies, ACL, Intrinsyc and Jabber. He serves on the Advisory Boards of Qpass, Singlestep, Network Clarity, Web Relevance, Cascadia Capital, vCustomer, Medio Systems, iXmatch and Communitect.

John R. Ellis

Ellis has over 25 years of experience in startups and research, in entrepreneurial, managerial and technical roles.

Most recently, Ellis was SVP of Engineering and Operations for AltaVista, and helped turn around the web search pioneer, leading to a successful $140M acquisition by Overture and then Yahoo. He hired industry technical leaders and led the team in greatly improving AltaVista's search products, once again innovating in web search, and gaining parity with industry-leading Google.

Prior to AltaVista, Ellis was an Entrepreneur in Residence at New Enterprise Associates, helping to launch a storage startup. In 1996, he co-founded Post Communications, the first e-mail marketing company based on relationship marketing. As VP of Technology, he helped grow Post to 150 employees, 70 clients, and 3 terabytes of managed customer data, enabling an acquisition by Netcentives for $380 million. At Open Market, he led a team building a first-generation content-push product for Time Warner.

Ellis spent over 15 years at Xerox PARC, Digital Equipment's Systems Research Center, and Yale University, researching compilation for VLIWs, programming environments, distributed computing, garbage collection and wireless PDAs, and receiving two patents in programming-language implementation. He received a BSE from Princeton University and a PhD from Yale University, and his thesis won the 1985 Association for Computing Machinery Best Dissertation Award and was published by MIT Press.

Ming Lei

Ming was one of the four founders of Baidu, the largest Chinese search engine and the seventh-largest web site in the world, where he was in responsible for Baidu's core technology. As the chief architect, Ming designed the Baidu search engine system and led the core engineering team. Ming led the Blitzen Project in 2002, after which Baidu's overall search quality exceeded that of Google Chinese, and maintained Baidu's market leadership in China. Ming also coordinated various departments within Baidu to revise their advertising strategy, and contributed to tenfold year-over-year customer growth and Baidu's profitability.

While he was at Stanford, Ming interned with Ignition Partners to evaluate deals and plot a Chinese investment strategy. Ming was also part of a team that designed and launched a major search engine's mobile search strategy in 2004. Ming is an MBA candidate at Stanford, and holds an M.S. and B.S. with honors in Computer Science from Peking University. In high school, Ming earned the Silver Medal in China National Physics Contest, besting 10 million student participants. He also served as Vice President of the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Stanford, and the President of the Student Union at EECS School in Peking University.

Paul Ryan

Ryan is CEO of Perform Local, Inc., an early-stage startup in local advertising. Previously, he was the Chief Technology Officer of Overture Services, Inc., the pioneer in pay-for-performance Internet advertising. While at Overture, Ryan built the largest pay-for-performance search engine on the web, leading the technology team and having overall responsibility for the core technologies and business processes that supported the company's business.

Prior to joining Overture, Ryan was CIO for Delray Farms, LLC, a Chicago-based retail startup, where he built the systems and business process infrastructure for a $250 million retail concept. Before Delray Farms, Ryan spent nearly four years at Deloitte & Touche, LLC as a management consultant, and more than four years as a software engineer, project manager, and lead systems designer for Digital Equipment Corporation. Ryan received a B.S.E. from Princeton University, an MS in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University, and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.