Life is either a daring adventure, or it is nothing at all...
~ Helen Keller
Adam Rifkin is an entrepreneur
in Silicon Valley. He spends
his time
working on his third startup PandaWhale,
inspired by great conversations with startup founders at
106 miles.
Adam is no longer funemployed, although he does still love pandas and lobsters.
Prior to retirement, Adam spent most of his time as Director, CEO, and Co-Founder of a venture-backed startup called Renkoo. Renkoo made Facebook and MySpace applications that were enjoyed by more than 36 million people. Adam also worked on an open source real-time Web server project called
mod-pubsub with Joyce Park, his Renkoo co-founder.
Adam's career began in the 1990's with over seven years of work at
Caltech
on a doctoral fellowship, sponsored in part by
Microsoft
and IBM.
His research explored Internet-scale publish/subscribe systems and
ancillary
Internet-scale Event Notification Services.
He left Caltech in 1999 before completing his PhD to found enterprise software company KnowNow
with Rohit Khare.
Adam served KnowNow
in several roles over five years, including CTO, COO,
VP Marketing, and VP Engineering -- wherever
the company most needed him at any given time.
He left day-to-day operations of KnowNow in mid 2004 and joined
CommerceNet, where he
served as Director of Open Source Initiatives until early 2005,
when he joined Joyce Park in founding Renkoo.
Adam's fifteen years of industry experience include research and
development engagements at Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, the Air
Force, and NASA-Langley. Adam also worked on
consulting assignments for companies such as
Canon, Nextel, and Sun, as Founder and Principal of
4K Associates,
an alliance of Internet professionals offering
strategy consulting to organizations of all sizes.
Adam has
authored over 30 publications
in distributed & decentralized systems and event-driven
architectures, receiving Best Paper awards at the IEEE
International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing
and the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
Adam graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.S. in Mathematics and
Computer Science from the
College of William and Mary;
has a pair of Master's degrees (one east coast, one west coast);
and was certified as an Engineering Manager from the Caltech
Industrial Relations Center in 1995.
Adam presently lives in
Palo Alto,
California, with his wife Michelle, cats
Beavis and
Lola
(RIP Bob),
and young cats Coco (RIP Dharma) and Didi.
His hobbies include blogging,
tweeting,
letting go,
falling down,
reflecting,
simplifying,
breathing,
affirming, and
connecting. Adam believes we should all
be here now and that
only kindness matters in the end.
-- Adam Rifkin, 9 December 2011
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