Yanda Heavy Industries
Happiness Engines
Yan-David (Yanda) Erlich is currently plotting his next venture, Happiness Engines. Most recently, he was the founder and CEO of ChoiceVendor, a software-based services company focused on information transparency for small and medium sized businesses, which he successfully sold to LinkedIn in September 2010. He was also the founder of Mopho.to, a mobile, geo-aware, social photography start-up. Prior to ChoiceVendor and Mopho, Yanda founded Social.IM, a social network instant messaging client and service that he sold to iSkoot (now Qualcomm) in 2008. He was also an Entrepreneur in Residence at Battery Ventures and is an active angel investor and advisor to several startups including Mixer Labs (acquired by Twitter), Thumbtack, Loosecubes, SafetyWeb, BetterWorks, and BoostCTR. He started his career with software engineering and program management roles in Microsoft's subscription services group and was also a product manager at Google in both the advertising and consumer product areas. Yanda earned an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business and a Bachelors of Science in both Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering from Rice University, where he was also one of the original founders of Connexions, a non-profit collaborative environment for publishing and sharing educational content. More at http://yanda.com