Who, or What, is Klep?
I was born on July 2, 1977 in Rochester, NY. I grew up in the suburb of Pittsford, NY and graduated from Pittsford Sutherland High School in 1995. After that, I went to Stanford University, where I obtained a Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science. My Masters concentration was Human-Computer Interaction, with significant coursework in Systems as well. During the summers while in college, I had a variety of internships including work at Xerox, Apple, WebTV, Be, and Third Voice. While I was finishing up my Masters, I started working full-time at Bluedog as employee number 5 and leader of the now-legendary SHAG group. After Bluedog, I joined Reactivity, which was a combination incubator and consulting company. I worked for a year on the project that became Raplix/CenterRun and later got bought out by Sun Microsystems. Then I rejoined Reactivity proper, which turned into an enterprise software/security company, and was (much) later bought by Cisco. I was the lead engineer on the UI for Reactivity’s web services security product. At some point in all of this, I co-authored Professional C++ along with my friend Nick Solter. In December 2004, I left Reactivity to join 3D Marketing Technologies (now called M-Factor). 3D makes software that helps companies plan marketing initiatives.
I left M-Factor late in 2005 for a part-time teaching gig at Stanford and to start something on my own. SpotDJ was officially started in January of 2006. The company was founded by myself and Kevin Barenblat, and we were soon joined by Grant Goodale. We do social music stuff — you can read about it here.
In my spare time, I like reading, cooking, scuba diving, and hacking small programs together (I used to write shareware). I’m also learning how to play the guitar, but I’ve been “learning” for the last seven years. I like to listen to classic rock and have been known to periodically attend concerts by bands who have lost at least one member to old age. I can make balloon animals. I tend to buy a lot of stuff on the Internet. Some people call me Klep.
