Management

Dr. Ge Wang,
Co-Founder and Chief Creative

Ge is an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in 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). He sits on the Board of Governors for the San Francisco Symphony.

ge's homepage | @gewang

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/.

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, Chief Design Officer

As Chief Design Officer, 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.

Alex "Zhongling" Li, Chief Technology Officer

Alex leads the engineering efforts to create innovative Smule products. He is the architect for Smule Nation server platform. Previously, Alex was VP of Engineering at Booyah, where his team built the backend from scratch and delivered several mass-market iOS and Facebook games including MyTown. Prior to Booyah, Alex served as architect/principal engineer roles for several bay-area startups in wireless and enterprise software industry, as well as large web companies like eBay and InfoSpace. Alex holds a MS in Computer Science from Columbia University and BS from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Prerna Gupta, Chief Product Officer

Prerna is Chief Product Officer at Smule, where she leads product and marketing strategy. Previously, Prerna co-founded Khush, the leading developer of intelligent music apps, and led the company to profitability and acquisition by Smule in 2011. Prior to her foray into entrepreneurship, Prerna worked in consulting at Monitor Group and early-stage venture capital at Summit Partners. She studied Economics at Stanford University, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 2004. Prerna was voted one of FastCompany’s Most Influential Women in Technology 2011, and her writing has been featured in the New York Times and TechCrunch. She is also a budding angel investor and Resident Mentor at 500 Startups.

Parag Chordia, Chief Scientist

Parag is Chief Scientist at Smule. He is the former 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.