Playdom

Before taking the helm at Playdom, John served as President of Publishing and Chief Operating Officer of Electronic Arts (EA), where he oversaw global operations for the four billion dollar gaming company and drove EA's digital initiatives. In addition, John drove a push to move EA from a software to a services model, and spearheaded the company's expansion into social gaming. Prior to joining EA, John served as President and CEO of Revolution Heath and CEO of Ticketmaster, the world's leading live event ticketing company. During his tenure at Ticketmaster/InteractiveCorp (IAC), John also oversaw several leading online entities such as Evite.com, Match.com, CitySearch.com and ReserveAmerica.com. John is a Director of the Board for The Artists Den, a music production and promotion company, and previously held Board of Director positions with Expedia.com, Active.com, Fastclick, Going.com and Extend Health. John earned a BA from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard University. John's favorite Playdom game is Wild Ones because global, synchronous, social, multi-animal animated annihilation can't be beat.

Brad drives Playdom's legal strategy and oversees a majority of the company's business operations, leveraging his deep experience managing legal departments for multi-national public companies and practicing corporate law. Before joining Playdom, Brad served as general counsel and corporate secretary for Leslie Rudd Investment Company, the Las Vegas Sands Corporation and Ticketmaster. Although his expertise in the gaming and ticketing industries is invaluable, Brad's personal obsession with online gaming makes him perfectly suited for Playdom. Brad graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School and summa cum laude with a BA in business and economics from UCLA. Always an overachiever, one could debate whether Brad works harder advancing Playdom's corporate initiatives or leveling up in Mobsters 2.

As Chief Technology Officer, David ensures that Playdom develops excellent front-end engineering while building flawless back-end scalability. With more than 20 years of experience in the technology industry, David has been leading the direction of the technology industry for most of his career. Prior to joining Playdom, David served as a Senior Vice President at Yahoo! where he delivered their Open Strategy and Data platform and drove Yahoo! to open its network to third parties and encourage social integration. Before that, he held various executive roles at Microsoft, and his work ranged from managing the experience of Windows Vista to adding mobility to Microsoft Exchange Server. He was also a leader in MSN.com, the creation of Microsoft's Java Virtual Machine, and the creation of Internet Explorer. On top of it all, he still manages to maintain clean factories and a happy population in Social City!

Christa oversees Playdom's financial management and forecasting, and helps drive the company's strategic planning. Christa comes to Playdom from Thomas Weisel Partners, where she served as managing director for four years and a senior equity research analyst for almost a decade. In 2009, while covering market leaders from Google to Yahoo, Financial Times ranked Christa the #1 Internet software and services analyst for earnings estimates in the United States. Prior to joining Thomas Weisel, Christa held an assistant vice president position at Merrill Lynch. Christa graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Carnegie Mellon with degrees in economics and German, and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. Much like her Wild Ones character, Christa always hits her targets.

Paul is charged with driving Playdom's growth through international expansion and business diversification, a role that's perfect for him given his twenty-plus years of experience making big things happen. Most recently, Paul led international market development at eSolar, an innovative utility-scale energy company. Before taking on the world's energy challenge, Paul drove strategic growth for Ticketmaster from the UK and Los Angeles, and served as CEO of a wireless technology startup called Antiron. Paul has a BS in engineering from West Point and may or may not have worked in military intelligence from 1986 to 1991. Perhaps that's why he's affectionately called "The Cleaner" at Playdom—or his fastidiously tended plots in Lil Farm Life may inspire the name.

The founding CEO of Playdom, Dan Yue now serves as the company's Chief Product Officer. In the same ilk as many of the Valley's leading entrepreneurs, Dan is an interesting character. Prior to Playdom, Dan was employee #1 at Adify, an ad network platform acquired by Cox Enterprises in 2008; founded several wildly unsuccessful technology start-ups; and served as technical consultant to Wynn Design and Development. With a degree in physics from Swarthmore College, Dan uses data-driven insights to understand what players want and deliver it. A lifelong gamer, Dan has played thousands of hours of Final Fantasy 7 and Baldur's Gate 2, and spent 34 long days as a semi-professional Blackjack player. Dan's commitment to the player experience runs so deep that he wakes up several times a night to check the performance of our games.

Ling founded Playdom as a Stanford PhD candidate in computer science. Before Playdom, Ling puzzled over data anomalies at Google and researched the scalable visual analysis of large datasets at Stanford. Ling has an MS in computer science from Stanford and a BS in electrical engineering from Berkeley—both accomplishments squeezed in between marathon sessions of Counter-Strike. A literal student of the world, Ling lived in Beijing, Shanghai, Toronto and Vienna before moving to the Bay Area to "study" his two favorite things: CS and gaming.

Chris spent two years as a Google engineer before founding Playdom. Before officially joining Google, Chris received his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon — completed in a record-breaking two years and ten months — and interned at, you guessed it, Google. Chris also holds a BA in computer science from Berkeley. However, his knack for programming and obsession with gaming goes much further back: As a high schooler, Chris took 14th place in the USA Computing Olympiad and spent countless days trying to program his first 3D RPG.