About

The Thread Team

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Sofa Labs reinvents the web's most popular products using emerging social platforms. It was founded in January 2009 by an experienced team with decades of collective experience at PayPal, YouTube, Netscape, Tokbox, and numerous startups.

Sofa Labs's first product is Thread, launched in public beta in September 2009. The first relationship site built entirely on the Facebook Connect platform, it helps you meet new friends through your existing friends… and even play matchmaker!

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The Team

Katherine Woo

Katherine Woo

Head of Product and co-founder

Katherine, also an early PayPal product manager, went on to become head of PayPal Merchant Services Product, Sr. Director of Product Strategy, and Chief of Staff to Meg Whitman in her last year as CEO of eBay. Katherine went to Stanford Graduate School of Business and Harvard-Radcliffe College. She wishes Thread existed years ago so she could've met her boyfriend earlier.

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Brian Phillips

Brian Phillips

CEO and co-founder

Brian was an early PayPal product manager who went on to become Sr. Director of PayPal Consumer Product Management. Prior to starting Sofa Labs, he was VP of Product and Design at Tokbox. Brian holds a JD/MBA from Santa Clara. He is currently single and plans on finding his future wife on Thread.

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Skye Lee

Skye Lee

SVP of Romance and co-founder

Skye was PayPal's first VP of Design, shepherding its user experience through rapid growth, acquisition, and integration with eBay. She was an early designer at Netscape and has advised numerous startups on user experience. Skye is a Carnegie Mellon graduate. Additionally, she is a mega-matchmaker who has introduced 2 married couples, and counting!

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Erik Klein

Erik Klein

CTO and co-founder

Erik, an early employee at PayPal and YouTube, has over 10 years experience coding ground up software for both corporate and start-up companies. He helped grow YouTube’s infrastructure to scale from 0 to 100+ million users. He met his girlfriend through friends, and is passionate about quickly building scaling websites and playing funk music.

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Brian Nelson

Brian Nelson

Software Developer & Ops Engineer

Brian, also known around here as B, is both a feature developer and operations guru for Sofa Labs. He has honed both skill sets at a diverse set of companies like Involution, Chordiant, PayPal, Netscape, Zip2, and BlueO2 (a company he founded). He met his girlfriend online, who has even helped QA Thread on occasion.

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Herbert Ho

Herbert Ho

Senior Software Architect

Herb comes to us from YouTube, where he worked on community engagement features. Prior to that, he was a software engineer at PayPal. He has computer science degrees from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Illinois Institute of Technology. Herb got introduced to his fiancee by a Facebook friend (his aunt!).

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Jamie Lottering

Jamie Lottering

UX/Front-End Engineer

Jamie handles all of our front-end code and sometimes helps design. HTML, Javascript, and PHP aren't the only languages he knows, he also speaks Japanese very well! Raised on the streets, Jamie learned to defend himself at a young age. He also is a purple belt in karate.

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