HipGeo is the brainchild of Rich Rygg, Scott Daniel and Jeff Kunzelman. They go back a ways in time, space, and experience.
Scott is a software dude and a serial entrepreneur who got his first taste of the startup world when he founded Quadtel just out of college, He later sold it to Phoenix Technologies and ran their PC Division for a few years. When the world wide web was born he jumped into everything Internet. He and Jeff built one of the very first Java WYSIWYG web page editors, which they sold to GeoCities/Yahoo! He then spent two years at Yahoo! as VP of Engineering for Media and Entertainment and there became a passionate Ultimate Frisbee freek, still playing every week. More recently he launched LittleYell.com and Toolcritic.com. Now he’s combining his passion for new technology with geolocation services to build HipGeo.
Rich is the token non-coder who approached Scott and Jeff with the idea of building a Mint.com for geolocation (that's HipGeo). The three founders originally met some 15 years ago when Rich acquired Futuretouch for GeoCities as VP General Manager, and the three of them moved to northern California to work for Yahoo! He launched Yahoo! Websites and Yahoo! Domains, took some time off to ski and climb mountains, and most recently founded iChange.com. Rich was an internet guy before there was an internet, getting his start at Compuserve and AOL. He’s passionate about English Premiere League Football, online social dynamics, geocoded anything, and admits to playing Call of Duty with his teenage sons.
Jeff is a software architect, engineer and serial entrepreneur who’s been stuck working with Scott for 25 years through many startups (Futuretouch, LittleYell, Toolcritic, HipGeo) and couple of big companies (Phoenix and Yahoo). He was a senior software architect and manager at Quadtel and Phoenix. At Yahoo! he was a Senior Director leading the PageBuilder and then the Media engineering teams. He's a mountain biker and a home theater nut and audiofile. Lately, he's become an iPhone programming adept. In recent polling, he was voted "nicest founder" by a significant margin.
