Management Team

ericklinker
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
Bram Cohen

Chief Scientist and Co-founder

Bram Cohen is the Chief Scientist and co-founder of BitTorrent, Inc. and the creator of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution protocol. Bram is also the co-founder of CodeCon and the co-author of Codeville. Prior to the creation of BitTorrent, Bram worked at MojoNation. MojoNation allowed people to break up confidential files into encrypted chunks and distribute those pieces to other computers running MojoNations software. This concept served as the inspiration for Bram’s development of BitTorrent. Before MojoNation, Bram was a quintessential dot-commer, working for several Internet companies through the mid-to-late 90s. Bram grew up in New York City, graduated from Stuyvesant High School and attended the University of Buffalo.

Mitchell Edwards
Mitchell Edwards

Chief Financial Officer and General Counsel

Mitchell Edwards is the CFO and GC of BitTorrent, Inc. Mitchell has over 20 years of high-tech executive management, finance, legal and transactional experience. Prior to joining BitTorrent, he has served as a senior executive and board member of numerous emerging growth high-tech companies, a private equity fund, and was a partner of a major international law firm. His experience includes serving as CFO and GC of Groxis, Inc., VFC Technologies, Ikano Communications, and Digital Courier Technologies. Mitchell was also a Partner at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison in LA and SF where he specialized in corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions for high-tech companies, and structured, negotiated and oversaw dozens of initial public offerings and venture capital financings. Other experience includes positions at Shearman & Sterling, at the White House and at the United States Supreme Court. Mitchell earned a J.D. from Stanford Law School, a B.A./M.A. from Oxford University and a B.A. from Brigham Young University in Economics.

Simon Morris
Simon Morris

Vice President of Product Management

Simon Morris is the VP of Product Management at BitTorrent, Inc. where he is responsible for the direction of BitTorrent’s software clients, products and services. 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.

Simon Morris
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).

Ashwin Navin
Ashwin Navin

Co-founder

Ashwin Navin is Co-founder and Board Member of BitTorrent, Inc. He hails from Yahoo! where he was an influential member of the company’s Corporate Development group. He possesses extensive experience in structuring and negotiating acquisitions, partnerships and alliances in the tech industry. While at Yahoo!, Ashwin was responsible for M&A, divestitures and company strategy in the U.S. and key global markets such as India and Korea. Before Yahoo!, Ashwin worked with Wall Street powerhouses Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Merrill Lynch as an investment banker and research analyst. Ashwin earned a dual B.A. from Claremont McKenna in Government and Economics.

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
Brad Templeton - Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Ashwin Navin - Co-founder, BitTorrent, Inc.