Chris Coyne | Co-founder, President, & Creative Director

Chris has masterminded three of the world's most popular websites. As Co-Founder and Creative Director of TheSpark.com, Chris oversaw development of both TheSpark.com and SparkNotes.com. TheSpark earned acclaim as Maxim magazine "Site of the Year," Yahoo's "Best of the Web" and countless press mentions including USA Today, Jane, Time, and Newsweek. SparkNotes.com remains the world's most popular educational website and has been written up in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and U.S. News. As Co-Founder and Creative Director of OkCupid, Chris is once again trying to bring people happiness -- this time by playing matchmaker. Chris graduated from Harvard College with a BA in Mathematics.

Sam Yagan | Co-founder, Chief Executive Officer

Sam has spent six years as an entrepreneur, first as Co-founder and CEO of TheSpark.com, Inc., maker of SparkNotes, the world's leading brand of educational study aids. More recently, he has served as President of MetaMachine, Inc., developer and distributor of the world's leading P2P file-sharing application, eDonkey. Sam has also served as Vice-President and General Manager at Delias, Corp., and Vice-President and Publisher at Barnes & Noble, Inc. Sam has a BA in Applied Mathematics & Economics from Harvard College and an MBA from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.

Max Krohn | Co-founder, Director

Max Co-Founded TheSpark.com and served as its Chief Technology Officer; at OkCupid, Max designed the Ok Web Server (OKWS) and continues to help with OkCupid's technological development. OKWS is specialized for building fast and secure Web services. Despite its emphasis on security, OKWS shows performance advantages relative to popular competitors such as Apache, Flash, and Habob. After co-founding OkCupid, Max decided to take some away to pursue a Ph. D. in computer science from MIT. Max graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics.

Christian Rudder | Co-founder, Editorial Director

Christian first gained fame as Editorial Director of TheSpark.com, where he authored the web's most popular personality tests. He also designed and wrote TheSpark's series of infamous science projects, including The Fat Project, Stinky Meat, Stinky Feet, and Date My Sister. In addition to contributing to OkCupid's editorial content, Christian moonlights with his band, Bishop Allen. Christian graduated from Harvard College with a BA in Mathematics.

Vinay Pai | Chief Technical Officer

Vinay's skills with the red and blue shells can even knock Chris Coyne out of first.

second_phoenix is Vinay on OkCupid.

John Marc Imbrescia | Software Engineer

JM was a devoted user of OkCupid for over a year before becoming an employee in February of 2006. Prior to that he worked a boring but not altogether soul sucking job as a reporting expert in the .NET world.

Happy to be devoting his time to something interesting JM has taken over as testmaster. On weekends you will often find him around the city playing poker. JM graduated from Rensselaer with a BS in Electronic Media, Arts and Communication and Computer Science.

Olatunde Adonai | Software Engineer

Quack!

Eujern Lim | Software Engineer

Eujern loves soccer.

Adam Spooner | Senior Web Designer

Adam was once seen wearing a Yankees hat, for which JM and Buecheler haven't yet fully forgiven him.

Eli Gwynn | Software Engineer

Eli plays the saxophone, loves jazz music and can speak Mandarin at the level of a 6 year old Chinese child. Yes, that picture's actually him.

Tom Quisel | Software Engineer

Tom's robotic arms give him twice the strength of a normal man, but we can't find him a keyboard that doesn't shatter after a few days.

Walter Mundt | Software Engineer

Also an active user of the site for a year or two before joining the company in February 2008 (he still is), Walter previously worked as a Java developer for a few different defense contractors in Florida. He also did competetive computer programming when he was in college at UCF, and thus acquired the "C++ rockstar" skills that earned him a place on the OKCupid team.

Meghan Beres | Office Chick

Meghan holds an Honours BA in Dance and Creative Writing from the University of Iowa, which totally qualifies her to work at a web company. She does lots of things, but primary among her job duties are making sure Sam doesn’t go insane, writing surveys, busting spammers and never, ever letting the programmers run out of Diet Pepsi. (Seen “Gremlins”? Yeah.) She is meghanberes on this site.

Erik Steigler | Network Administrator

Erik tries to make sure the servers don't get overloaded, he also drinks a lot of the Pepsi that Meghan ensures is available.

James Dowdell | Software Engineer

Elusive and mysterious, of him not much is known. At different times and in several places his presence was often claimed, influencing the outcome of great events from the sidelines; few have dared come forward publicly, and of them most were quickly silenced. Scant fragments remain, floating on the outskirts of rumor and myth:

"...materializing the Longest Road from nowhere, the emigres of His Great Nation wrecked havoc on the island..."

"...and He called down great raking lightening upon Chaos Bag[?] and all who followed him ... and they were obliterated..."

Rumored to have last been seen in a pointy magician's hat with moons and stars sprinting south on the Brooklyn Bridge screaming "How do I get to Uptown?!!"

Peter Welch | Web Designer

Peter Welch has very large hands. Goldfish provided for scale.

Craig Hammell | Web Developer

Craig doesn't have the time to write another mini-profile, but he does have the time to link to the one he's already made. Woo!