Our Team

 

Trevor Blackwell, Ph.D.

Founder and CEO

Blackwell was a principal in Viaweb, a startup that created the first point-and-click Internet storefront system. The product became Yahoo! Store when Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo! in 1998. Tens of thousands of merchants currently use Yahoo! Store to sell over the web. He is a founding partner in Y Combinator, a new kind of venture firm specializing in early stage startups.

Blackwell received a Ph.D. in 1998 from Harvard University, where he worked on randomized network protocols, randomized compiler optimizations, and other random things. He has published in the proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, IEEE Infocom, and USENIX. He has also published some widely read technical articles on his personal website.

Scott Wiley

Vice President of Mechanical Engineering

Wiley received his mechanical engineering degree from Oregon State University in 1983. As a former employee of Lockheed, Measurex, and Honeywell, he has managed engineering groups, and led the development of hardware for the International Space Station, and more than thirty products currently on the market. Wiley holds several patents in sensor and mechanical technology.

Daniel Casner

Robotics Engineer

Casner has worked on robotics in both academic and industrial settings including autonomous underwater vehicles at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and intelligent decision making for automation at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute.

In 2007 Casner completed his Master's thesis at RPI on adaptive topology control of mobile distributed sensor networks. He received his Bachelor's degree in Physics from Lawrence University in 2006 with a senior project in AI problem solving using AIBO robots and sensory graph planning.

Benjie Nelson

Robotics Engineer

Nelson's love of robots started in high school when he began participating in FIRST, a national high school robotics competition and realized this was what he wanted to do. He attended Stanford graduating from the Mechanical Engineering program with a BS in 2007 and a MS in 2008 with an emphasis in robotics, mechatronics and automatic controls. He finds that robots are right at the intersection of engineering and puppetry, which he trained in as an apprentice to the Magical Moonshine Theatre.