Throughout his four decade career as a manager, entrepreneur, and developer, James has established a well-earned reputation as a thought leader and mentor, leading world-class engineering teams to build transformative technologies.

James is currently reinventing financial services as Co-founder and SVP of Engineering at Lightspark, a company created to explore, build and extend the utility of Bitcoin. Previously, James was the Vice President of Engineering for Novi, Facebook’s digital wallet, served as the Head of Engineering for Instagram, and was Vice President of Engineering for Yahoo’s media properties. In addition, James has mentored innumerable startup development teams from their earliest days, including the likes of Looker and Turo.

As a founder and engineering leader, James reinvented telephony and advertising, first as a senior engineering leader at Tellme Networks, then as founding CTO at LiveOps, and ultimately as founding CTO and then CEO of Luminate. Early in his Silicon Valley career, James created the building blocks of the internet – initially as an engineer at Borland, helping develop C++, and then at Netscape, overseeing their flagship product, the Netscape Navigator.

James would have finished his Computer Science degree at Penn State had he not been so busy working for the university writing software. He lives in Marin with his partner Karina and their black lab, Banana.