Joseph Essas

Co-Founder and Managing Director

2022

Board Member

2019

Compensation committee

Venture Partner

2011

President and Chief Technology Officer

2020 - 2022

Chief Technology Officer

2012 - 2022

Leading Engineering, Product, Design, Operations and Data Science teams - connecting diners and restaurateurs. Teams focus on innovative software solutions for restaurants including table management and CRM, which in turn exposes real time availability to diners for online reservations. Realtime APIs power Google, Apple, Tripadvisor and hundreds of other partners. Operating real time software for 60k+ restaurants in 9 countries, and seating 35mm+ diners per month. Driving very diversified technology stack - developing software in Node.js, Java and C#. Enabling huge growth in native mobile apps on all platforms - translating into 50+% of all diners booking reservations on mobile devices.

Board Member

2017 - 2020

Board Member

2014 - 2019

Board Member

2015 - 2017

Chief Technology Officer

2010 - 2012

Responsible for building a 100 person team, including engineering, machine learning, operations, data analytics. Transformed core matching technologies of eHarmony into machine learning modeling and Hadoop driven stack, using graph optimization algorithms for optimizing most efficient relationships among participants of the network. Nurtured relationships with premier CS faculties in the world (Harvard, Brown etc) - to guide and advise on topics of linear programming, graph optimization and machine learning. Drove operational efficiency by streamlining budgeting, prioritization and agile development.

Vice President, Engineering and Operations

2008 - 2010

Ran all product development, production operations, deployment and long term architecture. Key improvements in reliability of service, matching quality and precision, and speed of development. Focused on simple, scalable solutions for SOA, reflected with APIs widely used internally and with mobile apps. Launched datacenters with DR capabilities, monitoring systems, and introduced performance management.

Vice President, Engineering

2002 - 2008

Led sponsored search and content monetization engineering teams. Launched several new products and was responsible for over $1B in total revenue flowing through small transactions. Transformed old technologies and systems into Yahoo software stack and was a key member of the leadership team that undertook one of the most ambitious and complex projects in Yahoo's history involving over 1000 people.

Principal

2001 - 2002

One of five investment professionals managing over $200 million in committed equity capital. Member of the Investing Committee. Active involvement in all portfolio company matters including directly recruiting senior management (CEO, CFO, etc.), leading and managing additional financing efforts, and technological roadmaps. Member of the Board of Directors of two portfolio companies. Negotiated the sale of a portfolio company to a publicly traded competitor, resulting in a profit on initial investment to the fund, as well as led successful capital and operational restructuring of two legacy portfolio companies. Actively worked with co-investors in portfolio companies including: Mellon Ventures, JAFCO, Clearstone Venture Partners, DFJ and others.