About the Team

Karel is a serial entrepreneur in social media, with over 10 years of technical leadership experience. Karel is founder and CEO of thruSocial, backed by IDG Ventures in 2007, building self-service social media software for small businesses. In 2005, Karel was the first senior software engineer at Facebook, reporting directly to Zuckerberg. His book "Inside Facebook" documents his year at the company and the dawn of social media. Karel was CTO of mEgo, and founder of PTrades, a full featured commodity trading community site. Karel architected and lead development of the templating engine that still, 8 years later, serves Looksmart.com and FindArticles.com. Fluent in Japanese, Karel co-developed a Java wireless information server, and led trial installations at Toshiba and NTT Docomo. Karel holds a Masters in Social Psychology from UC Santa Cruz. When not glued to his laptop, Karel loves nature, yoga, ultramarathons, and travel with his family.

Dave has a passion for end to end product design. He recruited and led the team that built TVleagues, a product that capitalized on the popularity of two concepts: reality TV elimination shows and fantasy sports style games. He went on to co-found, design and create Fandemic.com, a site that brought together a community of fantasy sports lovers, novices and gurus. Dave graduated from UC Berkeley's school of engineering with a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He loves a good healthy competition, brain teasers, Zachary's stuffed Chicago pizza and his wife.

Steve has over 15 years executive marketing experience implementing marketing strategies and managing internet marketing and product strategy. Prior to thruSocial, Steve was CMO of Decisioning Systems, VP Marketing at Reply.com, VP Database Marketing at Charles Schwab, Director Customers Strategy at Intuit. Steve also has a deep database marketing background, having served as VP, Database Marketing at Claria, and SVP, Relationship & Database Marketing at Young & Rubicam. Steve received his MBA from the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, and a BS in Finance from California State University Northridge. Steve is passionate about music, food and wine, skiing, and spending time with his family.

Doten is an accomplished business development professional, specializing in the sales of technology and customer satisfaction solutions. As a director at CIMA Systems, Doten helped pioneer and perfect the first digital marketing solutions for clients such as AutoNation and the American Auto Association. Previously, Doten sold enterprise systems and consulting services to car companies and their retailers in several sales management roles with ADP and Reynolds & Reynolds. Doten began his career as a district manager with General Motors and Nissan North America following graduation from Menlo School of Business in Atherton, CA. On sunny weekends, Doten can often be found cruising California's back roads in his restored 1965 Pontiac GTO convertible.

Hasin is an entrepreneur and architect, building social applications since 2007. He has written 4 technical books in computer science including on PHP and Facebook Technology. Hasin holds a bachelor in civil engineering, and application scalability and performance are his favorite research topics. Hasin can also be found winning video games and taking beautiful photos. He lives in Bangladesh with his wife and two sons.