The Pluggd Team

Alex Castro

CEO & Co-founder

Alex has deep product and management experience from Microsoft, Amazon, and Trilogy. At Microsoft, he was the Group Program Manager for the MSN Entertainment business unit, which included the MSN Music,Video, Movies, and TV websites. He also drove the company's device synchronization strategy for Windows Vista and was a key member of the CRM team. At Trilogy, Alex led the successful deployment of a complex CRM solution for Toyota. He was responsible for the marketing and program management of Amazon's web services and oversaw the launch of the Mechanical Turk online marketplace.

Alex holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science from Cornell University, where he also completed coursework at Cornell's Johnson School of Management. As an undergrad, he was named a AT&T Bell Laboratories Scholar, which provided a full scholarship to the college of his choice and an opportunity to work on digital media, voice over IP, and speech recognition at Bell Labs. As a graduate student, Alex was a recipient of a full tuition scholarship from the Microsoft Corporation.

Alex Alben

V.P. Corporate Strategy & Development

Alex joins Pluggd from a start-up in the social networking field-- Wetpaint.com-- where he forged relationships with media companies. At RealNetworks, Alex served as a Vice President for six years, handling government affairs, music products and the first Internet radio products. Prior to that, Alex was VP, General Counsel for Starwave Corporation, which launched ESPN.com, ABCNews.com, and other leading web sites. Alex was an Intellectual Property attorney in Los Angeles, where he worked for Orion Pictures and Warner Bros. He has undergraduate and law degrees from Stanford University and currently serves on Stanford's Law, Science & Technology panel.

Kate Roth

V.P. Engineering

Kate started her career at software engineer and has worked her way up from individual contributor, to lead, manager, and director. She has experience managing small teams hands-on to managing large business units. She has extensive experience implementing new process and reviving troubled organizations. Most recently she worked at a small local start up (Mixxer Inc) running their entire technology organization. She has worked in some of the top software companies including Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and Amazon.com.

Kate has a bachelors degree from Harvey Mudd in computer science and a masters of science degree in computer science from University of Washington.

Jonathan Thompson

Co-founder & Chief Architect

Jonathan is a highly experienced Software Development Manager and Architect. At BEA, Jonathan was Director of Architecture where he provided technical direction across many of BEA's enterprise Internet products and worked closely with several of BEA's key customers, such as British Telecom. While at Amazon, Jonathan acted as an Architect in the Amazon Web Services division and worked with the Amazon Core Platform team to improve the company's core technology. Jonathan is a veteran of several technology start-ups where he worked as a software engineer and then Development Manager. Jonathan also spent time as a developer at Microsoft and SGI.

Jonathan holds a B.S.E. in computer science from Princeton University and completed graduate computer science coursework at Stanford University.

Dave Bargeron

Principal Scientist

Dave has extensive experience inventing and building cutting-edge software. He worked at Microsoft Research for 8 years where he developed key innovations in artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and computer graphics. Much of his work at MSR was incorporated into Microsoft products, including Windows XP and Vista, Office, and Windows Media. Before MSR, Dave helped build MSN 1.0. Dave has published numerous papers in computer science and he holds seven grants and twenty pending patents.

Dave holds a B.S. degree in mathematics from Boston College and an M.S. degree in computer science from the University of Washington. Dave is currently on leave of absence from UW's computer science Ph.D. program.