About » The Barcode Hero Team

Blake Scholl, Co-Founder & CEO

Prior to co-founding Kima Labs, Blake was employee #1 and Director of Product Development at Kleiner Perkins–backed Pelago, one of the world’s first mobile location-based social networks.

Blake started his career at Amazon.com, where he helped create Amazon’s signature personalization technology. During his nearly five year tenure at Amazon, Blake founded the Automated Advertising Group, responsible for getting Amazon ‘sponsored link’ ad placements on Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and grew that program into a highly efficient marketing channel generating over $300M in annual revenue to Amazon. Blake also led Amazon’s early efforts in social product discovery and personally built massive-scale systems behind Amazon’s signature personalization technology. Blake holds a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science with honors from Carnegie Mellon University.

Blake is an avid pilot and enjoys the thrill and challenge of high-altitude mountain flying. When his head isn’t in the clouds, Blake can be found on the swing dance floor or reading philosophy.

Jason Crawford, Co-Founder & CTO

Prior to co-founding Kima Labs, Jason was Lead Engineer at Kleiner Perkins–backed Pelago, which was the venture capital firm’s first iFund company and one of the world’s first mobile location-based social networks. At Pelago, Jason created the first vector-based mapping engine which could run on everyday feature phones and architected all of the company’s mobile products.

Previously, Jason founded Amazon.com’s Landing Page Optimization team which was responsible for optimizing the shopping experience to help customers get to the right product faster.

He started his career at D. E. Shaw & Co, a global investment and technology firm. His first assignment was in David Shaw’s personal research group, where he helped create custom silicon for Anton, a special purpose supercomputer for use in drug design and discovery. Jason holds a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science with honors from Carnegie Mellon University.

Jason enjoys taking his life into his own hands—literally—as a rock climber. He is also a student of history and philosophy, with a particular interest in how ideas shape world events.

Andrew Miner, Principal Engineer

Prior to joining Kima Labs, Andrew was a Lead Engineer at Microsoft Live Labs where he single-handledly developed two open-source projects and managed the team responsible for building the original content for Microsoft Live Lab Pivot. Before that, Andrew was a Sr. Engineer at Kleiner Perkins–backed Pelago, where he was the architect of the company's iPhone product, SMS product, and build & deployment system.

Prior to Pelago, Andrew lead the team at Amazon.com which created Amazon Global, a service that makes buying internationally as easy as buying from your local Amazon website. Customers are able to place their order and pay for duties, taxes, tariffs and fee up front without any surprises, and their packages are delivered directly to their door. Having successfully launched that product, Andrew became the lead of the team which managed that function along with several others including shipment tracking and address validation.

Before joining Amazon, Andrew worked for IBM Global Services and Beluga Software. He hold a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Connecticut.

When he's not working, Andrew enjoys listening to classical music, singing, and playing video games with his son.

Investors

Barcode Hero's seed round comes from a syndicate of A-list angels, including SV Angel (Ron Conway), Naval Ravikant, Owen Van Natta, and former senior executives from Amazon.com, Google, Facebook, and Wal-Mart. The Washington Post Company also made a strategic investment as part of the round.

Selected investor bios:

Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and angel investor, co-author of Venture Hacks, and co-maintainer of AngelList. He was previously a co-founder at Genoa Corp (acquired by Finisar), Epinions.com (IPO via Shopping.com), and Vast.com (largest white-label classifieds marketplace). Naval has also advised Bix.com, iPivot, and XFire, among others, and invested in many companies, including Twitter, Foursquare, DocVerse (sold to Google), Mixer Labs (sold to Twitter), Jambool (Social Gold), SnapLogic, Plancast, Stack Overflow, Heyzap, and Disqus.

SV Angel (Ron Conway)

SV Angel is an angel fund where Ron Conway is a Special Partner.

Ronald Conway was recently named #6 in the Forbes Magazine Midas List of top deal-makers. He founded the Angel Investors LP funds whose investments included Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Good Technology, and Opsware. Ron co-founded Altos Computer Systems and took it public in 1982. Ron has served/serves on Boards/Advisory Boards including: Plaxo, Photobucket, Digg, Ask Jeeves, Facebook, Zappos, and StumbleUpon.

Owen Van Natta

Owen Van Natta served as CEO of Project Playlist, a music sharing website, Chief Revenue Officer and VP of Operations at Facebook, and Vice President of Worldwide Business and Corporate Development at Amazon.com, and was a founding member of the A9.com team.

The Washington Post Company

The Washington Post Company (NYSE: WPO) is a diversified education and media company whose principal operations include educational services, newspaper and magazine print and online publishing, television broadcasting and cable television systems.