Management Team

Eric Klinker

Chief Executive Officer

Eric Klinker is the Chief Executive Officer of BitTorrent, Inc. bringing close to two decades worth of networking experience as a technologist and innovator. Eric joins BitTorrent from his previous post as CTO and Vice President of Engineering at Internap, a leading provider of network optimization and content delivery solutions. Previously, Eric worked at netVmg, Excite@Home and the Naval Research Laboratory. Eric holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a master’s degree in EE from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

Bram Cohen

Chief Scientist and Founder

Bram Cohen is the Chief Scientist and Founder of BitTorrent, Inc. and the creator of the BitTorrent file distribution protocol, which he grew to be a third of all Internet traffic before taking any funding. He is currently working on BitTorrent Live, a new protocol to enable limitless scaling of live video content on the Internet. Before founding BitTorrent, Bram worked at a series of start-ups through the dot-com boom doing web development and networking protocols in the early days of the Internet. Bram grew up in Manhattan, and currently lives in the Bay Area with his family. Follow Bram on Twitter: @bramcohen

Shahi Ghanem

Chief Strategist and Executive Vice President of Marketing

Shahi Ghanem is a technology industry veteran, serial entrepreneur, and venture capital investor and advisor. Prior to joining BitTorrent, Shahi served as the president and CEO of STL, a digital media company that helps Fortune 500 companies manage, distribute and measure digital assets. He has also held similar roles at EmpowHER, a Health Media Company dedicated to female health and wellness, and Brickfish, an Internet advertising and social media company that delivers social media campaigns and metrics to clients in the fashion, sports, electronics and consumer products industries. Most notably, Shahi previously served as president of DivX, Inc., one of the world’s leading developers of video compression, digital rights management and media language technologies. During his tenure he helped grow the company from a pre-revenue startup into a profitable, multi-national, public company. Shahi was educated at Cal State Long Beach and the University of California at Irvine, where he majored in both economics and pre-med.

Simon Morris

Vice President of Data Science

Simon Morris is the Vice President of Data Science at BitTorrent, Inc. Before joining BitTorrent, Simon was the Director of Product Management for Openwave System’s Client Business, where he led all strategy, planning and execution for a $100 million-a-year global business unit. Prior to that, Simon led channel and product marketing for the worldwide PKI Affiliate business at VeriSign, a leading Internet infrastructure services provider, and was a founder of Mercantil, Inc., a successful venture-backed online business based in South America. Simon holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Cambridge University and earned his MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Ilan Shamir

Vice President of Engineering

Ilan Shamir is VP of Engineering at BitTorrent, Inc., bringing over 20 years of experience as a seasoned executive, manager and architect. Prior to joining BitTorrent’s world-class team of engineers, Ilan was the General Manager of Endpoint Products at Check Point Software Technologies, responsible for leading a distributed organization of 120 employees and the direction of products for both the consumer and enterprise businesses. Before Check Point, Ilan has held key leadership positions at Decru (now NetApp), ePit Systems, and Senterprise Inc. Most notably, Ilan was the CEO, CTO and Founder of SideTalk Inc. where he grew the company to 30 employees and later sold it to a public company. Ilan has also served as a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab focused on peer-to-peer software research. Ilan earned bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science from The Hebrew University (Jerusalem, Israel).

Ro Choy

Vice President of Marketing and Business Development

Ro Choy is a veteran entrepreneur and Internet industry leader. Today, he runs BitTorrent's business development and marketing teams, and is responsible for forming and expanding strategic partnerships to help our business grow exponentially. Before joining BitTorrent, Ro served as the Chief Operating Officer at Formspring, where he led sales, business development and marketing for this social media site with 20M monthly unique visitors. He joined Formspring following the acquisition of PeerPong, a Q&A service using NLP/semantics for identifying interests and knowledge from social streams - where he led as CEO. Previously, Ro was Chief Revenue Officer at RockYou and Director at eBay Motors, where he managed all business efforts and an online parts business, respectively. Ro is a co-founder of Cima Systems (a leading VOIP software provider for auto dealers) and currently serves as an advisor to a number of social media focused startups such as Applifer, Nanigans, Wildfire Interactive, Project Slice, Adnectar, 500 Friends, Guestmob, Facepad, Replybuy, J2Play, GamesthatGive, and Groupcard.

Sandy Diep

Vice President, Advertising

Sandy Diep is Vice President of Advertising for BitTorrent. She is responsible for driving ad network strategy, business development, and operations. Before joining BitTorrent, Sandy consulted for several early-stage consumer and mobile startups, advising on monetization, marketing and product strategy. Previously, Sandy was the SVP of Advertising at RockYou, a social gaming and advertising startup. At RockYou, Sandy was responsible for launching RockYou's brand advertising suite and overseeing product development, marketing, sales and operations for RockYou's 14B monthly impressions ad network and 1,000 publishers. Prior to that, Sandy held product marketing & product leadership roles at Yahoo!, TRUSTe, an online privacy platform, and Open Harbor, an enterprise e-commerce technology start-up. Sandy holds a bachelor's degree in Mass Communications from UC Berkeley.

Matt Mason

Vice President, Marketing

Matt Mason currently serves as Vice President of Marketing at BitTorrent, Inc. Before joining BitTorrent, Mason served as Director of Innovation at Syrup, a creative agency in New York, part of the LBi network. Mason is also the bestselling author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, the first book in the history of the world to hit the number one spot on Amazon’s economics/free enterprise bestseller list and the rap bestseller list at the same time. Mason began his career as a pirate radio and club DJ in London, going on to become founding Editor-in-Chief of RWD, which he grew into the second largest music magazine in the UK. In 2004, he was selected as one of the faces of Gordon Brown’s Start Talking Ideas campaign, and was presented the Prince’s Trust London Business of the Year Award by HRH Prince Charles. Mason has written and produced TV series, screenplays, comic strips, apps, records, and global advertising campaigns. His journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer Music Monthly, Dazed & Confused, Adweek, VICE, and other publications in more than 20 countries.

Board of Directors

Eric Klinker - CEO, BitTorrent, Inc.
Bram Cohen - Chief Scientist, BitTorrent, Inc.
David Chao - Co-founder and General Partner, DCM
Ping Li - General Partner, Accel Partners
John J. Cadeddu - Managing Director, DAG Ventures