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Management

Ted Rheingold, Co-Founder, CEO

Top Dog Ted Rheingold founded Dogster & Catster as a way for people to unite around their common passions. At Dogster, Inc., Ted sets the company's strategic direction and growth, though he's still a coder at heart. Prior to founding Dogster, Ted's entrepreneurial and leadership skills were honed running the web services company One Match Fire, which he founded in 2002. Ted began building web applications in 1996, and held senior engineering and design positions at global companies such as Preview Travel (now Travelocity.com) and Voquette, Inc. (now Semagix).

As an authority and leader in developing "passion-centric" online communities, Ted has spoken at numerous technology conferences and companies including CommunityNext, Web2.0 Expo, South by Southwest, Google Campus, The Future of Web Apps Summit and Webzine. Ted graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 with a B.A. in International Relations and believes his diplomatic skills are being put to great use bringing an end to the ancient canine/feline conflict.
Previously, Ted was Administrative Director of the California Council For International Trade. He also spent a year in Bangladesh as a Fellow with the International Development Exchange supporting community and women's initiatives

John Vars, Co-Founder, Chief Product Officer

Co-founder and Chief Product Officer John oversees company strategy, community, and the development and implementation of new products and technology at Dogster, Inc.
John is constantly sniffing out opportunities to introduce new products and technologies to the Dogster and Catster communities. He also manages the company's engineering and community teams as they build those products and keep the sites up and purring.

John earned his chops as a software engineer, web producer, and product manager working for global travel company Preview Travel, which merged with Travelocity in 2000. In 2002, he combined his love of travel and coding by becoming the Sydney, Australia-based manager and lead software engineer for Travelocity's international partnerships and joint ventures in the Asia-Pacific and Europe.

Growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, Vars' pets included dogs, cats, hamsters, bunnies, and fish--he kept eight aquariums in his room as a kid. His mother, who worked as a part-time zoo curator, also cared for exotic animals at home, including monkeys, lion cubs, and kodamundis.

Steven Reading, Co-Founder, Chief Business Officer

Co-founder and Chief Business Officer, Steven oversees partnerships, business development, sales, marketing and legal matters.
Born and raised in London he has made San Francisco his home since 1994. Steven holds a law degree from the University of London and a master's degree in tax law from Golden Gate University in San Francisco. He has spent the last ten years in finance, sales and business development. As a partner at Random Group he helped design and implement the Adobe Atmosphere Developers' Community, an early foray into online sociality and has most recently worked for Citigroup.

Board of Directors

Ted Rheingold

View bio above.

Michael Parekh

A Wall Streeter for over 20 years, former partner at Goldman Sachs, and founder of its Internet Research effort in 1994, Michael has been living online since the early days of CompuServe in the 80s and AOL in the '90s.

Michael helped build the Internet Research effort at the firm, which eventually comprised of many analysts covering major internet segments around the world.

Michael was the lead research analyst for the IPOs of Internet companies like UUNET, Yahoo!, eBay, DoubleClick, Webex, Real Networks, Exodus amongst many other pioneering companies, as well as covering companies like America Online and Netscape. He was an Institutional Investor ranked analyst for several years.

His focus spanned Internet sectors from software, access, infrastructure, and wireless to online commerce and content companies worldwide.

He got his MBA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1982, and BSc at Auburn University in 1980. He joined Goldman Sachs & Co. in 1982.

A native of India, Michael, aka Mukesh, grew up in the middle east., coming to the US in 1977 for college.

Michael serves on various advisory boards of start-up internet companies.

As an active investor, he is focused on both private and public, technology-driven opportunities.

Board of Advisors

Jeff Clavier

Based in Silicon Valley, Jeff is involved in finance, strategy and sales at Omnidrive. Jeff’s spent the past 16 years in the software market as an entrepreneur, senior executive and venture capitalist. Throughout his career Jeff’s been exposed to the global market, leading development teams throughout Europe and on Wall Street, designing internationally sold products and investing in software infrastructure start-ups across the United States and Europe. Jeff blogs at blog.softtechvc.com

Scott Rafer

Scott Rafer has been helping Internet publishers and users jump on What’s Right Now! since 1995. Today, that means delivering services for social publishing and discovery. Scott is CEO of Lookery, as well as co-founder of Mashery and chairman of Winksite. Lookery is an ad network and user-targeting service that is supporting the growth of social applications starting with Facebook. Mashery manages API and developer programs on behalf of web services providers including Facebook app providers. Winksite helps publishers large and small assemble active mobile communities around their brands based on the content they already syndicate. Just before all that, he was CEO of MyBlogLog until Yahoo! acquired the company in January 2007. Before MyBlogLog, Scott tried to build blog/RSS search companies in both 1998 & 2003. Before the first dotcom boom, Rafer led Internet products group Kodak Hollywood, worked in investment banking at Needham & Company, and graduated from the M&T Program at UPenn.

(From Scott's personal site - http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/rafer/)