Kee Hinckley
I founded or co-founded seven of the eleven startups I’ve been involved in. I have dealt with everything from financing (VC pitches, finding private investors, cutting deals with corporate investors, by my own bootstraps), to marketing and sales, to public presentations, tutorials, panels and standards committees. On the technical side I have ranged from pure development, to managing development and IT groups, to providing architecture and technology solutions for developers.
- My strongest skills are the speed with which I can gain an understanding of the strengths and limitations of new systems, and the ability to translate between the technical and non-technical–whether it’s turning a customer problem into the architecture of a technical solution, or acting as a gateway between product owners and developers. I’m a generalist who doesn’t just want to know how my project works, but how it fits into the larger ecosystem around me.
- As a team member I am happiest when I know that what I’m doing makes it possible for others to excel.
- As a developer, I want to write code and processes that are understandable, sustainable, and testable.
- As an architect, I want to find solutions that best fit the company culture and goals, while recognizing that idea solutions need to be tempered by the realities of time and resources.
- As a leader, I look for excellence in developers so I can support, promote, and integrate their ideas into a holistic solution which matches the long term goals of the company.
Experience
- Tech Lead
- Meta
- Mar 2022 - Jan 2023
Tech Lead for Scaled Human Operations in Meta’s Integrity Foundation (trust & safety) organization where I provided technical direction for the teams overseeing the software that manages all of Meta’s content reviews, integrating the new Metaverse content and behavior review systems, and guiding Better Engineering efforts.
- Onboarded the Metaverse Integrity initiative
- Lead the Better Engineering initiative
- Senior Principal Engineer
- Xperi Corporation (TiVo)
- Oct 2012 – Feb 2022
Responsible for the end-to-end architecture of the pipelines and databases which feed OTT, VOD, and linear metadata and availability information from thousands of data sources to millions of client devices.
- Spearheading a project to replace legacy pipelines and databases with a modern message-based architecture feeding a central graph database.
- Setup and managed an architecture review team that ensures new metadata projects anticipate product requirements, and UX designs reflect metadata capabilities.
- Built analysis tools to automatically detect potential metadata quality and matching errors, and detect anomalies and gaps in the data we produce.
- Gathered metadata pipeline data from various company divisions to build a comprehensive view of our pipeline timing and delivery capabilities (assembled from 20 years of acquisitions), and built custom software to visualize data flow and predict the impact of processing speed and timing improvements.
- Drove the move from a once-a-day, batch delivery system to a Kafka-based, real-time delivery architecture which cuts metadata delivery time from days to minutes.
- Co-developed the process, and wrote custom metadata matching algorithms, for the emergency four-month transition from Gracenote to Rovi metadata, saving the company millions of dollars in yearly licensing fees.
- Technical representative for customer pre-sales engagements with companies such as RCN, Virgin, Mediacom, Cox, Liberty Global, and others. Provided training for marketing and sales engagements. Wrote engineering documents on best practices for onboarding new customers and partners.
- General architect and reviewer for new Metadata-related projects and partner engagements with linear and OTT providers such as Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Disney, and others.
- Lead Architect
- Zinc.tv
- May 2010 – Oct 2012
Software company that matched and collated hundreds of online video sources into a single application where users could find the content they wanted to watch without having to search each separate siloed service.
- Brought in to take over as lead architect and redesign the software into a service that could split off from the parent company (ZeeVee) and be acquired.
- Co-designed/developed new matching algorithms and a message-based data pipeline.
- Developed the TiVo integration software and technical presentations which resulted in the sale of Zinc to TiVo.
- Owner
- Somewhere.Com, LLC
- Jan 2001 – Apr 2010
An internet consulting and development company utilizing a network of independent consultants.
- Managed and implemented projects that included web site and security consulting, spam-tracking tools, intranet and extranet development, e-commerce sites, graphic design (print and web), social media management software, and startup and business-plan evaluation and creation.
- Directory of Technology: Hosted Services
- MessageGate
- Feb 2004 – Sep 2005
A Boeing spin-off that commercialized their anti-spam system as part of an enterprise data compliance system.
- Added bulk manipulation, a scalable database backend, and significant performance enhancements to MessageGate’s corporate data compliance phrase dictionary.
- Managed teams locally and in India.
- Produced technology and strategy evaluations and whitepapers on data complaince for the CTO and Marketing teams.
- Co-Founder & General Partner
- Messagefire, LLC
- Jan 2002 – Jan 2004
A unique anti-spam service that used header and network analysis to identify spam without depending upon content analysis.
- Collaborated on marketing strategy and the design of spam detection rules.
- Designed and implemented the Messagefire public web site and internal administrative tools including content management, account management, e-commerce and billing, sanitized web mail, and automated customer-support systems.
- Helped pitch the company to VCs, leading to our acquisition by MessageGate.
- Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer
- OneCallWeb, Inc.
- 2000
Re-launch of a company providing automated phone-tree services to small organizations.
- Re-designed the website and billing system.
- Designed the architecture to integrate OneCallWeb into NetCentric’s Unified Messaging Platform to facilitate our sale to NetCentric.
- Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer
- Saroca, Inc.
- Sep 1999 – Aug 2000
Re-launch of a small boat company.
- Co-wrote marketing collateral and the business plan, and helped pitch the project to obtain initial angel financing.
- Designed web-based reseller system to take a lead, identify an appropriate rep., set up contact, follow-up on sale, take the order, notify the manufacturer and shipper, and follow-up on delivery.
- Managing Partner
- USWeb
- Oct 1997 – May 1998
Affiliate-based national web development and internet consulting firm.
- Created a plan for an east-coast Strategy and Solutions Center.
- Created presentations and literature to aid offices in developing strategic consulting offerings for USWeb offices.
- Founder, President & Chief Technology Officer
- Utopia Inc.
- Sep 1994 – Oct 1997
An internet consulting and web development company. Built the company from one employee to 70 employees and five offices in the US and China when we sold it to USWeb.
- Did sales, marketing, white papers, proposals, RFP responses, development, design, and emptied the wastebaskets.
- Designed and implemented secure commerce, conferencing, custom search, database, push, dynamic web page, server plugin and Java solutions for clients ranging from Fidelity Investments to the Chicago Tribune to the Boston Museum of Science.
- As we grew, hired staff and executives to manage sales, marketing, and day-to-day running of the company.
- Senior Software Engineer
- Wildfire Communications
- Sep 1992 – Aug 1994
A phone service providing a voice-controlled digital assistant that handled contacts, incoming and outgoing calls, and listened for commands during conversations.
- Designed and implemented a UI toolkit for a phone-based, digital assistant that transparently handled voice, computer and two-way pager interfaces for Wildfire’s digital assistant.
- Co-Founder & Vice President
- Alfalfa Software, Inc.
- Sep 1989 – Aug 1992
Co-founder of a startup that developed a multi-media, client/server email system targeted at hardware vendors looking for an office application suite.
- Designed and implemented the user-agent for Poste; a multi-media, client/server email system supporting both X.400 and internet standards. Poste’s underlying object model allowed transparent modification of C++ objects both locally and remotely. Portions of Alfalfa’s email technology became the backbone of AT&T’s WorldNet mail system.
- Designed C++ class wrappers for OSF/Motif, and patched a multitude of bugs in the toolkit.
- Wrote an implementation of the X-Open standard localization package for Unix that was included in the Linux, NetBSD and FreeBSD operating systems.
- Co-wrote a non-centralized source-code-control package that let developers maintain their own repositories while merging with the selected changes from any other developer.
- Designed Alfalfa’s logo, ad copy, press releases, photo layouts, newsletters and tradeshow booth designs.
- Gave conference classes and full day tutorials on OSF Motif™.
- Member of UEC Selection Team
- Open Software Foundation
- Sep 1988 – Aug 1989
Apollo’s representative on the five-person User Environment Component team that selected the standard GUI for OSF’s member companies.
- Evaluated more than thirty submitted UI toolkits and specified the final mix of submissions that seemed most viable technically and politically, creating the industry-standard OSF/Motif™ UI for the Unix workstation market.
- Gave press and conference presentations on the selection process.
- Software Engineer
- Apollo Computer (Hewlett Packard)
- Sep 1983 – Aug 1989
Introduced new UI standards and worked on the development of UI toolkits. Helped the OS group bring Unix compatibility to Domain/OS. Worked to move the company to industry standard windowing and UI systems.
- Designed and prototyped a graphical extension language, and presented the results at INTERACT ’87.
- Project Engineer to port of X10 for the first industry X Windows announcement.
- Project Engineer responsible for Apollo’s standard “look and feel” and release of OSF/Motif on the Apollo platform.
- Rewrote and modernized Apollo’s command shell.
- Managed a team to design new system software release software.
- Served on a tiger team to fix problems in the first major Apollo release of Unix.
- Apollo’s representative to the IEEE P1201 GUI standards committee.
- Part of the Midnight Movie team that developed the first fully ray-traced movie short. Wrote a texture/pattern editor for the 2D and 3D object textures.
- Co-Founder
- Bright Ideas, Inc.
- 1985 – 1988 (part-time)
Co-founded a company to develop personal computer software.
- Designed and implemented a portable scenario compiler and runtime system for educational simulations, a PC-based fax communication system and extensible graphic format converter, and a software cookbook with shopping list support.
- Software Engineer
- Sperry Research Center
- Jul 1982 – Aug 1983
Designed and implemented a Unix-based smart-terminal windowing system.
- Summer Intern
- Bell Laboratories – Murray Hill
- May 1981 – Aug 1981
Designed and wrote Unix-based data analysis software for statistical analysis of psychology experiments.
Patents
Papers
Education
- Bates College
- BA, Anthropology
- 1978 – 1982
Skills
- General
- agile, anti-spam, email systems, internet development, internet communications, messaging architectures, metadata analysis, social media, startups, content moderation, text analysis and matching techniques, trust & safety
- Technical
- *nix, AWS, C, C++, Docker, Eleventy, Hack, Java, Javascript, Kafka, MacOS, Mongo, MySQL, Neo4J, Node, Perl, Python, React
