Our Team
Stephen Hood
Co-founder & CEO
Stephen is a veteran entrepreneur, designer, engineer, consultant, and teacher with experience spanning business and consumer software, mobile applications, gaming, educational technology, and the Web. He has co-founded two startups (Blockboard and Storium/StoriumEDU) and held senior roles at Yahoo and social bookmarking pioneer Delicious, where he first worked with Josh. Stephen is an avid reader, writer, and a life-long lover of games.
Josh Whiting
Co-founder & CTO
Josh has spent his entire career working on technology as an engineer and architect. He co-founded Blockboard with Stephen, was a senior engineer at Craigslist, and was engineering manager at Delicious. In his spare time he is a composer of electronic music. Josh and Stephen have worked together for years across four different startups, two of which they co-founded together.
Jeff Brain
Curriculum designerJeff is a middle-school teacher in Tiburon, California. He has taught a wide array of classes over his twenty-five plus years of experience in education, including technology, art, integrated media projects, game design, poetry, English, and history. He has consulted for Common Sense Media, Learning Company, Leapfrog, and Zynga. He has a Multiple Subject credential, a Masters degree from San Francisco State in Instructional Technology, plays jazz in the UC Alumni Big Band, and is a published poet and professional artist.
Matthew Farber, Ed.D.
Advisor
Matt is Assistant Professor of Technology, Innovation and Pedagogy at the University of Northern Colorado. His research is at the intersection of teacher education, learning technologies, and game-based learning. Matt has been invited to the White House, to keynote for UNESCO, and he has been interviewed about games and learning by NPR, Fox News Radio, EdSurge, The Denver Post, USA TODAY and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of the books Gamify Your Classroom: A Field Guide to Game-Based Learning and Game-Based Learning in Action: How an Expert Affinity Group Teaches with Games, and is co-editor of The Game Jam Guide.
Erin Hoffman-John
Advisor
Erin is a respected game designer, entrepreneur, and novelist. She led game design efforts at GlassLab, a Bill and Melinda Gates- and Macarthur Foundation-supported initiative to foster next-generation educational games. Erin has been designing games for the past seventeen years with studios and clients including Dreamworks Animation, Konami, and Zynga.
Veronica Belmont
Advisor
Veronica is a product manager and evangelist for Adobe Spark, where she works to help people bring creative ideas to life. She is also an advisor for tech startups like Goodreads and about.me (where she now sits on the Board of Directors). She co-hosts Sword and Laser, the hugely popular genre literature podcast, video show, book club, and publishing imprint.
Christina Wodtke
Advisor
Christina is an experienced technology executive, designer, and entrepreneur. She led the creation of Zynga’s social network/gaming platform and has been a general manager at Myspace, a product manager at Linkedin, and a design director at Yahoo. She co-founded the design journal Boxes and Arrows, and currently teaches game design and entrepreneurship at Stanford University.