William White

William White

CTO - 15 years of experience building enterprise and consumer apps. Led team of 10 engineers to develop large scale content personalization platform at AOL. Awarded 5 US software patents for media recommendation work at Yahoo.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/williammwhite
Twitter: twitter.com/williammwhite
San Francisco, California, United States
Member since August 21, 2014
  • About
Education
2000 McGill University , BA , Computer Science

I am a(n):

Entrepreneur

Companies I've founded or co-founded:
Fluence
Companies I work or worked for:
Yahoo, AOL, PwC, seagate technologies
Achievements (products built, personal awards won):

5 awarded US software patents focused on media recommendation technology
3 published academic research papers related to music information retrieval

If you're an entrepreneur or corporate innovator, why?

I'm bursting with ideas!

My favorite startups:

Stellar, Diffbot, Layer, Stripe, Square

What's most frustrating and rewarding about entrepreneurship/innovation?

The most rewarding part is when you see users coming back regularly and having great experiences using your product. It isn't easy to make that happen, but when you start to see it - you know you're on to something great.

The most frustrating part is working on a great idea that may be just a bit ahead of its time. Anything that's disruptive will take some getting used to by the general public. When you get it and you love it, you want everyone else to love it too.

Full bio

William is the CTO and Co-Founder of Fluence - a global network connecting creators, artists, and makers to the curators and trusted sources of the web.

Prior to starting Fluence with Shamal Ranasinghe, William led a team of 10 engineers to develop a large scale content personalization platform at AOL.  He has co-authored research papers on audio content similarity analysis and presented at ISMIR, Web2.0 and ACM Multimedia.   He is a serial inventor and was awarded 5 US software patents related to recommendation technology he developed while working at Yahoo! creating social media applications.  Prior to this, William spent 5 years as a Technical Consultant developing enterprise portal applications across the US and Europe for clients such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Chevron and Seagate Technology.

William holds a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec and studied Entrepreneurship at the London School of Economics.