Nick Sullivan

Nick Sullivan

CEO/Founder at Liftium Incorporated

San Francisco Bay Area

Current
Past
  • VP of Engineering, US at Wikia
  • Mediawiki Consultant at Metacafe
  • Engineering Manager at Wikia
Connections
224 connections
Industry
Internet
Websites

Nick Sullivan’s Summary

As a computer programmer, I build software and develop technology that simplifies peoples' lives. For the past 10 years, I’ve focused on Web-based product development, spanning the full range of initiatives from concept creation to large-scale rollout. I’ve lead development, user interface and systems administration teams, and most recently I founded an ad network monetization company called Liftium.

My unique blend of strong communication skills, intelligence and passion serves me well as a seasoned technology professional. It affords me the opportunity to understand how people think and then develop the solution that best suits their needs. My goal is to enlighten computers with the knowledge of how the human brain works. The more they learn about us, the easier our lives will be.

Nick Sullivan’s Specialties:

PHP, Linux, MySQL, Texis, XML, XSL, Scaling web applications, AJAX, Javascript, DHTML, Geographic tools, text search


Nick Sullivan’s Experience

  • CEO/Founder

    Liftium Incorporated

    (Privately Held; Internet industry)

    September 2009Present (3 months)

    Transforming the ad network monetization industry with innovative technology. Liftium offers a consolidated reporting and high-performance, real-time ad optimization solutions to publishers of all sizes. Liftium clients see a significant revenue lift, less latency and real data in real time.

  • VP of Engineering, US

    Wikia

    (Privately Held; Internet industry)

    January 2009September 2009 (9 months)

  • Mediawiki Consultant

    Metacafe

    (Privately Held; Internet industry)

    December 2008March 2009 (4 months)

    Directed Metacafe on proper implementation to extend and scale Mediawiki.

  • Engineering Manager

    Wikia

    (Privately Held; Internet industry)

    March 2008January 2009 (11 months)

  • Geek

    Wikinvest

    (Privately Held; Internet industry)

    March 2007May 2008 (1 year 3 months)

    Highly leveraged the Mediawiki platform, creating a top-notch site on investing. Roles included search technology, PHP expertise, system administration, technology consulting and SEO strategy development and implementation.

  • Architect (User Location Platform)

    Yahoo!

    (Public Company; YHOO; Internet industry)

    September 2007April 2008 (8 months)

    Focused on the company's #1 priority, architecting a new platform called User Location Platform (ULP). This serves to direct content and advertising to users based on their location.

    The platform services more than 10 billion transactions per day in less than 10 milliseconds. Purported to generate more than $800 million a year in revenue for Yahoo!.

    Architecture for User Location Platform involved technical design, exploration of various technologies, prototyping, benchmarking, hardware ordering and estimation, documentation and authoring technical specifications for the C++ developers.

  • Senior Technical (Yahoo! News)

    Yahoo!

    (Public Company; YHOO; Internet industry)

    February 2007September 2007 (8 months)

    For the largest news site online, offered architectural planning, service engineering, infrastructure development, PHP, Perl and feed processing. Worked on Yahoo! News for five months before being selected to perform a new role within Yahoo!, accomplishing three key initiatives:
    - Contextual Shortcuts on Yahoo! News stories (mouseover div popups with related information for keywords)
    - Flickr Integration with Yahoo! News stories
    - Formed and lead a new team (The Infrastructure Group) to solve technical infrastructure challenges permanently and completely instead of applying temporary solutions

  • Chief Software Architect (Web Development)

    Adicio

    (Privately Held; Internet industry)

    August 2000February 2007 (6 years 7 months)

    Lead technology from writing code to establishing standards. Architected and built suites of Web-based applications that interact to form an integrated product, powering organizations such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and News Corporation. The product is internationalized and localized in seven languages, powers hundreds of client Web sites, delivers more 100 million monthly page views and generates millions of dollars in revenue per year.

    Also responsible for hiring and managing development team, user interface team, systems administrators and IT. With these teams, developed solutions for the clients’ most challenging problems.

  • Director of Development

    Catalyst Communication

    (Privately Held; Marketing and Advertising industry)

    20002000 (less than a year)

    Architected, built and oversaw the development of bikestore.com, the leading bicycling Web site that included:
    - Searchable database of mountain bike trails (with radius)
    - Meta search that allowed users to search all cycling Web sites with one search
    - Online directory of local bicycle stores
    Also architected a B2B solution intended to integrate with major bicycle manufacturers.

    Under an extremely tight deadline, built and developed the site within two weeks of hire date. Additionally, built a team, mentored two junior developers and lead the system/network administration efforts for the company.

  • Developer

    Brassring

    (Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

    19992000 (1 year )

    Started as a junior programmer, then lead the group after only four months. Key accomplishments include:
    - Took over and maintained control of all mission critical technical processes for brassring.com
    - Overhauled the manual job posting process into an efficient, smoothly running automated system
    - Rebuilt the entire site, facilitating a new branding strategy
    - Saved the company $100,000 by writing an in-house content management system to replace the existing solution.


Additional Information

Nick Sullivan’s Websites:

Nick Sullivan’s Interests:

Technology passions include: * Scaling - I love making things go fast, finding out how to distribute load across clusters for availability and performance, and troubleshooting performance problems. I'm looking for a company with performance related challenges. * LAMP environments - I enjoy working with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. And even though it doesn't fit well within the acronym, I've been using Squid and memcached a lot lately too. * Text search - Web searches, job searches, resume searches, text processing, website spidering, text categorization, thesauruses, sentence processing, numeric pattern matching. Yum. * Geographic software - I have experience with geocoding, radius searches, geographic targeting, and the 'Paris' problem.

Nick Sullivan’s Groups:

  •    On Startups - The Community For Entrepreneurs
  •    Yahoo!
  •    Yahoo Employees
  •    Ad Operations Professionals
  •    End to End Web Developers

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