Yatown

Christopher Nguyen

is CEO & co-founder of Yatown. His expertise is in managing teams and large-scale systems. Christopher has co-founded two other successful start-ups, ACTGENT, and Agenda-Asia. He was CEO at Bluepulse, a venture-backed mobile start-up. At Google he was the Eng Director responsible for the operations of Google Apps (GMail, Calendar, etc). He is a recipient of the Google Founders' Award.

Christopher was also a professor at HKUST where he helped launch their Computer Engineering program. He was an undergrad at Berkeley and got his PhD from Stanford.

Jerome Park

is Head of Engineering and co-founder of Yatown. Jerome a highly regarded, hands-on engineering leader who in the early days of Google built and led the Enterprise Search Appliance partner team. At Netscape, he worked on some of the core engines of Netscape's infrastructure server suite. After his four-year stint at Google, he started his own company, Saymeon, to develop technologies now in use in various mobile imaging processing applications.

Jerome has a degree in Information Systems from UT Austin, and is a veteran in software engineering management.

Ramana Gadde

is a co-founder of Yatown. Ramana's expertise is in speech recognition and machine learning. He was previously the VP of Engineering at Bluepulse, a mobile startup. Ramana led the voice-recognition effort at V-Enable, which is the technology behind MetroPCS voice search. Before V-Enable, Ramana spent 10 years as a research scientist at SRI.

Ramana was a professor in Computer Science at IIT Madras, where he also got his PhD.

Tuoc Luong

is a director of Yatown, and CEO of Shanda Online and Head of the Shanda Innovation Institute in America. Recently, he was SVP of Global Search at Yahoo. He co-founded LookSpark, a fashion social network community that was acquired by Yahoo. He was also CTO at Zazzle, Ask.com, and was also GM at Microsoft's BackOffice and Hosted Services Division.

With more than two decades of engineering experience, Tuoc has also worked with Baan/Aurum Software, Borland, Pyramid Technology, Oracle, and Informix. Tuoc is author of the author of the book “Internationalization, Developing Software for the Global Market”. He did his CS undergrad at Berkeley and got an MS in Engineering Management from Santa Clara U.

Paco Sandejas

is a director of Yatown, and Managing Partner of Narra Ventures. His expertise is in high-tech venture investments and helping to build great, lasting companies. Paco’s 15 years in venture investing has seen success in Transmedia Communications (acquired by Cisco), SiRF (merged with CSR), Inphi (NYSE: IPHI) and Sandbridge Technologies.

Paco got his PhD from Stanford, where his entrepreneurial career also began. There he co-invented and helped raise funding for the Grating Light Valve, a Silicon MEMS spatial light modulator, which is one of Stanford's most profitable patents used in display and communications applications. The GLV was the basis of the Cypress acquisition of Silicon Light Machines.

Paco and NarraVC insist on saying, “We are proud to be associated with Yatown because we believe that Yatown is addressing a large, untapped market opportunity and its uniquely brilliant founding team. This could possibly be the next Facebook for local neighborhoods.”

... and other team members and friends & supporters whose contributions are really critical to Yatown and our users.