Adam Rifkin is an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who spends most of his time working on Renkoo.

Adam also works on two side projects with his Renkoo co-founder Joyce Park: an open source project called mod-pubsub, and a monthly gathering of entrepreneurial engineers in Silicon Valley called 106 Miles.

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 before completing his PhD to found KnowNow with Rohit Khare.

Adam served KnowNow in several roles over five years, including CTO, COO, VP Marketing, and VP Engineering -- depending on where the company most needed him at any given time. He left 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 leading companies Canon, Nextel, and Sun, as Founder and Principal of 4K Associates, an alliance of Internet professionals offering standards 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 and three cats Bob, Beavis, and Lola. His hobbies include contributing to his blogs and connecting people.

-- Adam Rifkin, 15 March 2007