Powerset has assembled a star team of talented engineers, researchers, product innovators and entrepreneurs to realize an ambitious vision for the future of search. Our team comprises industry leaders from a diverse set of companies including: Altavista, Apple, Ask.com, BBN, Digital, IDEO, IBM, Microsoft, NASA, PARC, Promptu, SRI, Tellme, Whizbang! Labs, and Yahoo!.

Barney Pell

Barney Pell, Ph.D. (CTO) For over 15 years Barney Pell (Ph.D. Computer science, Cambridge University 1993) has pursued groundbreaking technical and commercial innovation in A.I. and Natural Language understanding at research institutions including NASA, SRI, Stanford University and Cambridge University. In startup companies, Dr. Pell was Chief Strategist and VP of Business Development at StockMaster.com (acquired by Red Herring in March, 2000) and later had the same role at Whizbang! Labs. Just prior to Powerset, Pell was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield, one of the top VC firms in Silicon Valley.

Lorenzo Thione

Lorenzo Thione (Product Architect) Mr. Thione brings to Powerset years of research experience in computational linguistics and search from Research Scientist positions at the CommerceNet consortium and the Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory. His main research focus has been discourse parsing and document analysis, automatic summarization, question answering and natural language search, and information retrieval. He has co-authored publications in the field of computational linguistics and is a named inventor on 13 worldwide patent applications spanning the fields of computational linguistics, mobile user interfaces, search and information retrieval, speech technology, security and distributed computing. A native of Milan, Italy, Mr. Thione holds a Masters in Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.