Brian Pinkerton

Brian Pinkerton is former CTO of the Chan Zuckerburg Initiative, a philanthropic entity formed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his spouse, Dr. Priscilla Chan. Previously, Pinkerton was VP & General Manager at A9.com, and Chief Architect at Lucid Imagination, an open-source search firm.  Other past roles include Vice President of Engineering at Scout Labs, a social media analysis firm. Scout Labs acquired Minimal Loop, a search technology startup that he co-founded in 2007. Prior to that, Pinkerton held the position of Director of Search at Technorati and was responsible for Technorati’s blog search product. Pinkerton held the positions of Senior Architect, Chief Scientist, and Vice President of Engineering at Excite@Home.

Pinkerton created WebCrawler, the first Internet search engine, while working on his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 1994. WebCrawler quickly became a popular resource on the Net, and Pinkerton sold it to AOL in 1995. Prior to the development of WebCrawler, he spent four years in NeXT’s highly regarded software group, where he led the system performance effort and was instrumental in several key projects. Dr. Pinkerton holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington.