Location San Francisco, California, United States Regions San Francisco Bay Area, West Coast, Western US Gender Male
Investor Type Number of Exits
Jim is the Head Builder @ Thorn. Together with Ron Conway & Don Kendall, they co-founded the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation (2013). The Foundation launched the $1MM Smart Firearms Challenge & helped fund/foster safer firearm technology innovators like Kai Kloepfer, the founder/CEO of Biofire. In the early/mid 2000s, he was
a Director & Board President of Adolescent Counseling Services (ACS).
As an entrepreneur/executive, he was Head Builder @ Invisibly (2021), served as a Director @ Thorn, Chief Scientist @ Doppler Labs (acq. Adobe 2018), CTO @ Metabiota (acq. Backus/Ginko 2023), co-founder, CTO & CEO @ Attributor (acq. Digimarc 2012), Chair of the Technical Task Force @ Thorn, co-founder/Director @ Anchor Intelligence (acq. Comscore 2010), a consultant @ Facebook working on personalized ad targeting systems (2006), CEO @ Moreover Technologies (acq. Verisign 2005), & co-founder/CTO @ the Xerox PARC spinout Outride (acq. Google 2001).
Jim was a Research Scientist @ Xerox PARC & Chair of the WWW Consortium's Web Characterization Activity. @ PARC, he worked with the User Interface Research (Dr. Stuart Card Manager) & Internet Ecologies (Dr. Bernardo Huberman Manager) groups, which led to dozens of patents & publications, including "The Law of Surfing" in Science.
He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology under Dr. James Foley. His dissertation, "Characterizing World Wide Web Ecologies," was one of the earliest dedicated to empirically understanding the dynamics of the Web. Jim pioneered the field of online surveying by creating GVU's WWW User Surveys in 1993. A firm believer in the power of the Commons, his research paper, "Characterizing Browsing Strategies in the World-Wide Web," formed the basis for Web analytics & has invalidated tens of millions of dollars of patent lawsuits. At GVU’s 15th Anniversary (2007), he was awarded a GVU Impact Award. He was inducted into GaTech’s College of Computing Hall of Fame in 2024.
Jim graduated Cum Laude in Psychology from the University of Colorado. While there, he worked on prototyping the first uses of the Web for NASA. Jim spent a dozen years as a volunteer Senior Backcountry National Ski Patrol Patroller/Northern California Search & Rescue. He is a certified Hindu & Tibetan yoga teacher.
