Founders
Jim Rutt is the past Chairman of the Santa Fe Institute. He was CEO of Network Solutions, Inc., which operated the .com, .net, and .org domain namespaces on the Internet. He served as chief strategy officer and division President after Network Solutions was acquired by VeriSign in 2000. Prior to Network Solutions, Jim was the first chief technology officer of Thomson-Reuters and before that, he either founded or played a key role in several significant information services and network companies: THE SOURCE, Business Research Corp., First Call, Pinpoint Information, and NHC Systems. He was non-executive Chairman of the computer chip design software company Analog Design Automation from 2001 until its acquisition by Synposis in 2004. He was Researcher in Residence from 2002 to 2004 at the Santa Fe Institute, studying the application of complexity science to financial markets, social simulations, agent based models, and evolutionary artificial intelligence. Jim received his B.S. degree in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975.
Mark Frazier is Cofounder and president of Openworld, a nonprofit volunteer network specializing in innovative ways to remove barriers to entrepreneurship. He has worked in 50+ countries over the past three decades on policy reforms and free economic zones. Mark’s current focus is on strategies for self-help groups to become financially sustainable through land grants, and on virtual games to help awaken dormant property values. In Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, he is active in nonprofit groups working to improve the local business climate and expand access to skills via micro-scholarships. Earlier in his career, he was publisher and managing editor of Reason magazine, and cofounder of the Local Government Center, the springboard for Reason Foundation’s privatization practice. Mark Frazier is a graduate of Harvard University and former Visiting Fellow of the Lehrman Institute.
Jordan Greenhall was a co-founder of DivX and served as the Company’s CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directions from 2000 until 2007. From January 1999 to June 1999, Mr. Greenhall was Vice President at MP3.com, a digital media company. From July 1999 to January 2000, Mr. Greenhall served as a Strategic Consultant with INTERVU, a premier streaming media services provider. Mr. Greenhall received a J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School and a B.A., summa cum laude, from Texas A&M University. From 2009 to 2012 he served on the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute. He is presently on the Board of Directors of One Health Solutions and Mogul and on the Board of Advisors of Takelessons.
Bruce Kunkel is Managing Partner of Bruce Kunkel – Integral Human Capital. In the eighties, Bruce founded and ran Dovetail, Inc., a high tech Silicon Valley executive search firm. Earlier, Bruce enjoyed success as co-founder and recording artist with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Later, he was founder and CEO of Zenbod Corporation, a fashion company. Bruce has been a hi-tech organizational consultant. He has secured and counseled key talent for engineering, sales, marketing, operations, and finance sectors for pre-IPOs and startups, as well as public technology clients. He has taught statistics and experimental design at the university level. Bruce is co-founder of the Santa Rosa Integral Salon and is active in SF Bay Area integral community organization.
Mark McDonough currently manages software testing for VisionFoundry in Tyson’s corner, VA. He has done a little bit of everything in the web industry: QA, Tech Writing, Development, Database Administration, and UI design. He has been a computer keypunch operator, an FM DJ, a start-up entrepreneur, an architectural historian, and a reporter. He also has been the business manager for a museum and a high school history teacher specializing in instructing the great unwashed – the latter of which he says was probably his favorite job, and far and away the hardest. Mark received his Masters of Education from Harvard University and his BA from Brown.
Thor Muller has been a San Francisco-based Internet entrepreneur since 1995, most recently founding a company called Get Satisfaction. He is also the co-founder and former Managing Director of Rubyred Labs, a web apps firm. Thor was a first generation Web entrepreneur, creating Web success stories for companies such as Yahoo, Dell, Bank of America, Intel, Virgin Records, Fujitsu, Discovery Channel, and Sony. In 1995, he started and ran an early Web development boutique, Prophet Communications, where he served as VP of Digital Media. He just co-authored a best-selling book called Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work For You and Your Business. Over the last few years Thor has been collecting people who have an interest in systemic overhaul, and is interested in helping to build out this network towards a pragmatic end.
Bill Nichols is currently doing information architecture for a government agency. He has twenty five plus years in technology and twenty plus years in financial services. Bill is an expert in software design, production and sales, corporate governance, and the plumbing of the financial system – especially securities markets and payments systems. Bill was the CEO of a startup sold to Thomson Financial in 1995 where he remained for more than seven years. Bill has a significant background in M&A and operations integration. He has consulted for a variety of companies, from NY’s most prestigious wine merchant to Nasdaq.
Gk Parish-Philp has extensive expertise in building online digital media communities and brands. He spent 5 years each in product management at MP3.com and DivX and was instrumental in growing them from start-ups to successful IPOs by managing their online product strategies with an eye toward developing powerful, engaged communities around their brands. He is now running his own startup, Groundswell Enterprises which focuses on leveraging the power of technology and networks to the benefit of the ‘little guys’. Groundswell’s first product is Affabl (formerly BackMyBook), a web publishing/community/e-commerce platform that enables artists to create online communities around their content and sell directly to fans.
Mick Rocks grew up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. and graduated with a degree in Business Administration from the University of Maryland. He pursued a career in IT that spanned over 30 years – primarily in Oracle based database application design and project management for the media industry. In 2005, Mick picked up stakes and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where he started a new career in the film industry. After finishing a degree from the local film school, Mick immersed himself into as many aspects of film and video production as he could – working on camera crews, digital editing and even as a rigging electrician on the film “Avengers”. Mick put his writing skills to work creating a short screenplay “Zombiewood”, which was filmed in early 2012, and is currently in post-production.
Curtis Faith is best known as a member of the elite Chicago trading group, the Turtles. The group started as a bet between its founders: Were traders born or raised? In his early 20s, Curtis earned more money than makes good sense as a Turtle and he wrote a bestselling book, Way of the Turtle, detailing these adventures. He retired from trading at 27. Curtis has been a successful and very unsuccessful tech entrepreneur. He founded several software and tech startups. Curtis sometimes serves as a part-time CTO and advisor to startups and has consulted to the marketing and development departments of many Silicon Valley startups. Curtis has spent the last five years in field research for a book on the economic underpinnings of poverty and other seemingly intractable social problems.
Cameron Stephens is the founder of Tradewinds Consulting, and focuses on optimizing business strategy, processes, and systems. His expertise in process design, CRM and SaaS as the industry has evolved has positively impacted clients in telecom, technology, commercial real estate, hospitality, medical technology, publishing, and other industries over the last decade. Grounded in philosophy and technology, his current interest is in designing sustainable solutions that adapt to complexity without compromising their initial principles. Although a graduate of the University of Chicago, Cameron is a native Texan, does not care for the cold, and currently resides in Dallas.
Eleanor Wynn retired from Intel Corporation as a Principal Engineer in IT. She holds a PhD from UC Berkeley. She worked for 35 years as an anthropologist in the high tech industry, beginning as doctoral intern and Senior Scientist at Xerox PARC. Following that she was Senior Scientist at Bell Northern Research working on new telecom capabilities and uses for the Internet. She was Editor in Chief of Information Technology & People, an Information Systems journal, developing it into a respected outlet for cross disciplinary work. She joined Intel in 2000, working on innovative software for the workforce in distributed collaboration, social networks, and knowledge sharing, and pioneering the use of machine learning to track user behavior. She managed Intel’s sponsorship of Santa Fe Institute and other complex systems research programs. Since retiring she has pursued interests in international relations, computational social science, climate change and domestic politics.