Management

Dr. Ge Wang, Co-Founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer

Ge is an Assistant Professor at Stanford University, at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University and a BS in Computer Science from Duke University. Ge is the creator and chief architect of the ChucK audio programming language, and is the founding director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) and of the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO).

Jeff Smith, CEO and Co-Founder

Jeff is currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Music at Stanford University. He previously received a BS in Computer Science at Stanford University. In between Stanford and Stanford, Jeff co-founded and ran an email security software company which he took public on the Nasdaq and grew to $50M in sales before stepping down as CEO. Jeff is the co-author of sixteen patents in the field of email security. Read more by Jeff on his blog at http://ridingeast.blogspot.com/.

Jodi Ropert, Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer

Jodi is responsible for driving Smule's marketing and revenue, focusing on the growth of Smule's customer base, brand and business. Jodi brings over 16 years of marketing, business and entrepreneurial experience; prior to Smule, Jodi co-founded Barefoot Explorers, an iOS eco-game studio, that pioneered the Play2Plant model, where users plant real trees through gaming. Before Barefoot, Jodi was an executive at Microsoft for a decade, spanning multiple roles including heading Global Product Management and Consumer Marketing for MSN, leading International Marketing and Business Development for MSN, and running Mac Office business and marketing. Jodi holds an MBA from UCLA and a BA from University of Washington. Jodi's favorite Smule app is Magic Piano, and her daughters love Magic Fiddle and Glee Karaoke.

Sunil Pareenja, Chief Financial Officer

Sunil Pareenja is the Chief Financial Officer at Smule where he manages the finance, legal, human resources, and real estate functions. Sunil has significant experience in corporate acquisitions, international operations, public company reporting and compliance, raising capital, and helping scale technology companies. Prior to Smule, Sunil lead finance teams at Engine Yard, Inc. and Tumbleweed Communications Corp. and previously worked at Hewlett-Packard Company and Arthur Andersen LLP. Sunil is a Certified Public Accountant in the State of California and holds a BA in Business Economics from UCLA, and an MBA from UC Berkeley.

Jeannie Yang, VP of Product Alchemy

As VP of Product Alchemy, Jeannie guides Smule's projects from concept through completion. Prior to joining Smule, she worked at Yahoo! where she helped start up their first social media research lab, as well as launched 7 public research prototypes and 3 public web services. At Yahoo! Brickhouse, she assisted in the launch of the first open location brokering platform, Fire Eagle. Jeannie joined Smule in 2010 after realizing her passion lies in startups and helping make things happen with small teams that dream big. Concurrently, Jeannie is a house music DJ. She received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and a M.S. in Information from UC Berkeley.

Zhongling "Alex" Li, VP of Engineering

Alex was VP of Engineering at Booyah for three years, where his team delivered several mass-market iOS and Facebook games, and built the highly scalable backend platform from scratch. Prior to Booyah, Alex served as architect/lead engineer roles for several bay-area startups in wireless and enterprise software industry, as well as large Internet companies like eBay and InfoSpace. Alex holds a MS in Computer Science from Columbia University and BS from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Prerna Gupta, CEO Khush

As CEO, Prerna has overseen the growth of Khush's flagship product, LaDiDa, which has received over 2 million downloads and led the company to profitability. Prerna also produced viral videos for LaDiDa receiving over 100 million views. Prerna studied Economics and Computer Science at Stanford University and worked on marketing strategy at Monitor Group and early-stage deal sourcing at Summit Partners before making the move to entrepreneurship. She was named one of FastCompany's Most Influential Women in Tech 2010, and her writing has been published in New York Times and TechCrunch. Prerna's favorite instrument is her voice.

Parag Chordia, CTO Khush

Parag is CTO at Khush. He is the director of the Georgia Tech Music Intelligence Lab, a research institute funded by the National Science Foundation to build intelligent systems that are musically creative. Parag was recently the recipient of the competitive NSF CAREER Award for his research in music prediction. He received a PhD in artificial intelligence and music at Stanford University and a BS in Mathematics from Yale. He has extensive experience managing commercial software development, and is also the founder of BolRecords, an Indian classical music record label. Parag is an actively performing Indian classical musician and electronic music composer.

Alex Rae, Co-Founder Khush

Alex is Creative Director at Khush. He has been programming music since 1995, using analog synthesizers, hardware instruments and developing custom software in PD, Max/MSP and Python. Alex received a Masters in Music Technology at Georgia Tech, and a BA in Physics at Harvard. As a musician, he is renowned for his sound design and intricate rhythmic sequencing. His recent research has focused on building intelligent systems for music interaction and performance. Alex has also been trained in classical piano and classical guitar, and is an accomplished composer and producer of electronic music.