Matt Papakipos's Resume
Expertise
Starting & growing startup computer technology companies
Creating great hardware and software products
Hiring and managing great engineering teams
Investing in early-stage technology companies
Career Highlights
Ads: Facebook Local Awareness advertising system
Mobile networking: Facebook WiFi
Operating Systems: Chrome OS
Web browsers: GPU-accelerated browsers & web applications
Chip design: Programmable GPUs
Project Skills
Entrepreneurship
I start & grow high technology startup companies. I excel in hiring top engineering talent, and together conceiving and building innovative products in new categories. I am very comfortable with all stages of startup growth, including financing, hiring, product specification, hardware and software architecture, engineering management, product positioning and launch, evangelism, and press.
Investing
I invest broadly in public and private markets. Most of my public market investing is in broad indexes. I do a handful of angel investments every year with specific companies. I invest as an LP in VC funds as well.
System Design & Architecture
I architect complex computer systems. I’ve invented and patented a large number of hardware and software algorithms for solving real-world problems. I design systems that are novel, yet practical. I like solving problems that seem impossible to others: making graphics chips programmable (NVIDIA), making browser apps as fast as conventional native apps (HTML5), making web apps that use graphics hardware (WebGL), creating a new consumer operating system (Chrome OS).
Leadership
I’ve managed both hardware and software project teams, with team sizes up to eighty five people with multiple managers reporting in to me. I’ve recruited and hired hundreds of great engineers, and trained and promoted new engineers and managers and coached them through their first successful projects. That said, I love working in small teams whenever I can.
Intellectual Property
I’ve been awarded over one hundred and fifty patents. I’ve supervised disclosures and filing for hundreds more for my employees. I am well versed in protecting IP through all phases of high technology startup companies. I believe that great products come from novel ideas and technology.
Communication
I’ve negotiated software interface specifications with hardware and software vendors and standards bodies (OpenGL, WebGL, HTML5). I’ve spoken at technical conferences for developers using my products. I am frequently interviewed by technical magazines, industry analysts, and the financial press.
Education
Brown University, Bachelor of Science, Math/Computer Science.
Stanford University, mid-career attended Economics, Math, & CS courses for one year. Not enrolled in a degree program.
Employment History
Papakipos family investments, 2013-
Investor
Investing capital in a portfolio of venture capital, angel investments, and public markets. Some recent investment theses include:
Investing broadly in global public stock markets, avoiding petrochemical stocks
Investing in women: female founders, female venture capitalists
Investing in technology startups with founders who are underrepresented minorities
Investing in startups outside silicon valley: South Korea, Netherlands, ...
Investing in clean energy: solar, wind, batteries, etc
Anemone B.V., 2020 - 2022,
Amsterdam Netherlands
Amsterdam Netherlands
Founder
Built a cloud-based application for managing my investment portfolio of publicly traded global stocks , featuring complete automation of portfolio rebalancing and trading. The software has been managing real money for two years.
Pop Ventures (밥 밴조수), 2017-2018,
Seoul South Korea
Director
Formed a small investment fund and invested in five South Korean startup companies while we lived in Seoul for one year.
Pied Piper Robotics, 2014-2019,
Portola Valley, California
Portola Valley, California
Founder
Built a new robotics company. Pied Piper developed robots for use in homes. Pied Piper developed its first robot in 2015.
Engineering Director
Developed range of projects to connect Facebook more deeply into users' daily lives, including:
The Facebook WiFi project (see coverage by the LA Times.
The Facebook Local Awareness advertising system.
Worked on various company growth initiatives, including:
Building the Facebook engineering mobile hiring recruiting process, and hiring over 200 iOS and Android engineers.
Lead the design and deployment of Facebook's iOS and Android training program for engineers making the switch to mobile development.
Moved the Local Ads & Facebook WiFi teams from Silicon Valley to London.
Engineering Director
Created a range of browser, OS, and hardware technologies to make the web richer and a deeper part of daily user application experience. Created new technologies that give browsers and web applications the ability to use CPU & GPU hardware acceleration. This allows developers to create more compelling web applications.
I created and led the Chrome OS project at Google. Created a consumer operating system for netbook computers. Open sourced the software in 2009. Hired the engineering team. The team received a TechCrunch "Crunchie" Award for this work.
I created and led the Chrome GPU hardware project. Created mechanisms to allow web applications to use GPU hardware accelerated graphics. This includes WebGL and O3D.
Led the Chrome OS UI team for part of my tenure.
Led the Chrome HTML5 & APIs team for part of my tenure. These APIs expose the set of hardware and OS capabilities available to web applications in the Chrome web browser. This includes the HTML5 APIs. The APIs launched include: geolocation, offline APIs, rich text editing, WebSockets.
I started the NativeClient project and helped incubate it through its early days. NativeClient is technology for creating secure web applications that run native C++ code. Filed several of the key early patents.
CTO & occasional Acting VP of Engineering
PeakStream was a Silicon Valley startup company funded by Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Foundation Capital. I founded the company, raised two rounds of venture capital funding, and hired over half of the staff of the company. PeakStream was a leading company developing software environments for multi-core processors and GPUs. As CTO, I was responsible for product architecture, technical leadership, and all technical communication for customers, investors, business partners, and press. Google acquired the company in 2007.
Director of Architecture
I was responsible for the development of hardware architectures for NVIDIA’s graphics chips (GPUs). This included feature selection, hardware design, cmodel development, verification, and developer evangelism. I was responsible for salaries, performance reviews, raises, stock grants, promotions, organizational structure, and external communication for this group. I had four managers reporting to me and a total group size of eighty five people. I was responsible for protecting the IP generated by my group. All of the chip projects below shipped in volume to the mass market in PCs all over the world.
GPU development projects:
GeForce 6800 Family: Directed our first simultaneous development of three PC GPUs at once, with four managers reporting to me. This architecture is also in the PS3 game console.
GeForce FX & GeForce FX Go: Led IP review & filing of twenty five patents.
GeForce 4 & GeForce 4 MX: Directed two managers, launching two GPU chips simulatenously, enhancing profitability substantially.
GeForce 3 & Quadro 3: Created the first programmable GPU. This architecture is the heart of the XBox game console.
GeForce 2 & GeForce 2 MX
GeForce & Quadro: chip architecture & simulation
TNT & TNT 2: cmodel integration and verification
Engineering process initiatives:
Linux Server Farm: In 1999, I conceived and designed NVIDIA’s Linux server farm. I saw a tremendous opportunity to save money spent on Sun computers by transitioning our server environment to Linux machines. We rolled it out initially in a cubicle; today it is a server farm of more than 3,000 processors and terabytes of memory and petabytes of disk storage.
Chip Feature Database: I designed a web-based application for requesting, prioritizing, and managing feature requests for graphics chips. We used this to methodically manage and prioritize the vast number of incoming requests from our developer community and customers.
External communication:
Negotiated Direct3D graphics APIs with Microsoft, aligning the GeForce 3 perfectly with DirectX 8.
Created the “Multitexture” extension for OpenGL and achieved ratification of our new standard by the OpenGL ARB standards body, leading NVIDIA’s entry into the OpenGL ARB standards body.
Spoke at countless game developer events, including GDC.
Frequently met with top game developers at Id, Valve, Epic, Microsoft and EA to evangelize new product features for games.
Raycer Graphics, 1997
Palo Alto, California
Raycer was a startup company that developed a graphics chip for use in the CAD market. I was one of three architects for the Raycer scanline rendering algorithm. I was responsible for making the hardware architecture OpenGL compliant.
I developed UNIX device drivers for the Impact graphics workstation. I architected novel surface tessellation algorithms for the Odyssey graphics workstation.
I developed a system for interactive television presentation and led a small team coding the runtime software for presenting digital television content, including scripting system, graphics display, and input management.
I developed software for live video effects on Time Warner’s interactive television project. This system performed all the real-time fades, dissolves, wipes, etc. between live video sequences for an interactive shopping application that was deployed in Florida in 1994.
I designed a computer graphics system for offloading traditional optical film effects processing onto a computer system. Due to large dataset sizes, we used the IBM PVS, a 32 processor SMP supercomputer. I was responsible for all of the development of the core image processing algorithms on the supercomputer.
I developed a Mandelbrot Fractal viewer as a demo for this supercomputer. Compared to previous implementations, ours was the first that was fast enough to be honestly called real-time. This demo was avidly used by our sales force in selling the machine. I published a technical paper about the algorithm details, and how to extract maximum performance from the novel hardware architecture of this SIMD supercomputer.
UNIX X Server software development.
As leader of a three student team, I implemented a triangle renderer on the Connection Machine, a 4096 processor supercomputer. Published a Technical Report.
UNIX X Server software development.
UNIX C library validation.
Patents
US Patents Issued
Over 300 US patents issued: https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/static/pages/landing.html
Publications
Papers
“The PeakStream Platform: High-Productivity Software Development for GPUs”, LCI International Conference on High-Performance Clustered Computing, 2007: https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~cavazos/cisc879-spring2008/papers/WinHEC2007_PeakStream.doc
“Pseudorandom Number Generation on the GPU”, Graphics Hardware, 2006: https://diglib.eg.org/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10.2312/EGGH.EGGH06.087-094/087-094.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
“Efficient Rendering on Massively Parallel Architectures”, Brown University Technical Report, 1992: http://www.cs.brown.edu/publications/techreports/reports/CS-92-46.html
“Indirect Addressing and Load Balancing for Faster Solution to Mandelbrot Set on SIMD Architectures”, Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation, 1990: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/89495
Presentations
Chrome OS Open Source launch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JyFbF7QFlY
Google I/O 2009 Chrome keynote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5aJAaGZIvk
“The PeakStream Platform & Programming Model”, Code Generation & Optimization, 2007
“The PeakStream Platform”, GPGPU Course, Supercomputing, 2006