Jason Shellen
After leaving Google's new business development team in August of 2007, Jason Shellen created Thing Labs with the hope of encouraging and inspiring people to share great content. As an employee of Pyra Labs, Shellen was part of Google's acquisition of Blogger in 2003. During his tenure at Google, Shellen also became the founding product manager of Google Reader and holds provisional patents on feed and social media technologies. Shellen is on the advisory boards of Feedly, 8tracks, and the RSS Board and infrequently on the seat of a spiffy new road bike.
Chris Wetherell
Chris joined Thing Labs as a product and engineering lead in June 2009 and arrived with an in-development real-time project named "ThingThing." ThingThing emerged as Brizzly, a now popular Twitter and Facebook client. Prior to his work at Thing Labs, Chris consulted for Twitter as a project lead and before that worked as a senior engineer at Google where he started Google Reader. Earlier he suffered through the first Internet boom and bust at a startup, an experience he uses as fodder for campfire stories to frighten children.
Dolapo Falola
A former colleague of founders Chris Wetherell and Jason Shellen on the Google Reader team, Dolapo Falola hails from New York by way of Austin by way of Nigeria. Dolapo did much of the heavy lifting behind Brizzly Guide, but he's not going to brag about that. He enjoys Cheerios a bit too much for an adult.
Ben Darnell
Ben Darnell joined Thing Labs fresh off a stint at Facebook, where he was working after the company acquired FriendFeed. Prior to that, Ben was an early Googler and founding member of the Google Reader team (where he worked with our own Chris Wetherell, Dolapo Falola and Jason Shellen). Ben helps develop our infrastructure, APIs and more, and has made significant contributions to the open-source Tornado web server.
Zachary Taylor
Zachary Taylor joined Thing Labs after a stint as senior software engineer for local business review site Insider Pages. Zachary is the founder of Artbreak, a social marketplace for artists. He is also the founder of the 1200-member Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails Meetup. When he's not at the office, Zack is a student of rap music, stand-up comedy, and music industry conspiracy theories.
Grant Shellen
Grant Shellen spent more than three pre-Thing Labs years as a trainer in Google's online sales and operations division, teaching new dogs old tricks. A trained journalist, he is Thing Labs' default "word person, or something." Grant spends many evenings onstage telling terrible jokes in between songs by his band Farewell Typewriter.
Corinna Psomadakis
This spunky Greek will light a fire under your Camaro if your Shakira isn't blaring loud enough. Corinna is a liason to Brizzly users, a manager of all things business, and a vocal advocate for fixing so-called "bugs" that our engineers deny exist.
We are backed by Mike Hirshland (Polaris Venture Partners), Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC) & Michael Jones.
