Jeffrey Wescott

CEO & Co-Founder

Hacker, thinker, and experience junkie, Jeffrey has been creating software and leading people since the age of seven. He thinks in code and brings the gospel of beautiful design, systems thinking, and ruthless efficiency to the world of business innovation.

Prior to co-founding Zivity, Jeffrey led security software architecture and scalability at IronPort, defending your company's email inboxes from spam. He is a 15 year veteran of the software industry.

Jordan Ritter

Chief Technology Officer

Jordan has an extensive background in architecting secure and scalable Internet services and has helped create some of the Internet's most popular software. In 1999, he co-founded music-sharing service Napster, developing the original Napster technology alongside Shawn Fanning. In 2001, Jordan founded Cloudmark, where he led the development of email security system SpamNet with Zivity investor Vipul Ved Prakash. Most recently, Ritter served as CTO of Columbia Music Entertainment where he spearheaded radical change to cope with the rising prevalence of digital music. Jordan has long believed in bringing artists closer to their fans and feels that Zivity accomplishes this by simplifying the artist-fan economic relationship and connecting them directly to one another.

John Manoogian III

Director, User Experience & Product Design

John leads product design and user experience at Zivity, with his hands in everything user-facing. A sage of user psychology and consumer behavior, he's made a career of knowing what people want before they know they want it, from social bookmarking to portable micro-content to the next weird thing yet to be invented. He is also to blame for coding version one of Zivity's look and feel.

Prior to causing undue chaos at Zivity, John co-founded a wine-recommendations startup and ran the Experience Design & Interface Engineering teams at Organic. He writes about innovation & design at jm3.net. Zivity is his third startup.

Jeff Steinmetz

Producer & Editorial Director

Combining art with technology has been a long time passion for Jeff. Commonplace majors didn't fit the bill, so he took it upon himself to design his own interdepartmental major. As a result, he holds a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in Electronic Music, Theater and Computer Science. His move to help a growing consulting firm settled him in San Francisco where he quickly rooted himself in the music community. There he established himself as an event producer, DJ and performer for countless large scale events. He records and produces music at his own production company and was recently voted "Best Electronic Music Act" in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Music veteran and album producer Nile Rodgers selected a Kepi and Kat track for the Xbox 360 launch title, Perfect Dark Zero. Not a stranger to the editorial process, Jeff has been a co-author and editor for several Sam's Publishing "Unleashed" books. He belongs to NARAS and is a voting member for the GRAMMY awards.

Vanessa Naylon

Associate Product Manager

Vanessa works closely with Product and Engineering to help our users and build new solutions. She holds a BFA from UC Berkeley and is a pro at dealing with gnarly stuff. She’s spends her days feeling our users’ pain, planning out future releases, testing current ones, organizing picnics, and shooting playful photo sets!

Vanessa hasn't done anything “funny” yet, but we'll let you know just as soon as she does.

Cyan Banister

Founder & Editor-in-Chief

The idea for Zivity came straight from Cyan Banister. Cyan is Zivity’s 24-7 energy dynamo and inspirational role-model/den mother for Zivity’s exploding community of models. She has succeeded in a dizzying array of leadership roles throughout her career, from leading technical operations teams to driving marketing campaigns to being the CTO of a nonprofit helping women master technology. Afraid of nothing, Cyan’s mission for Zivity is putting models first and creating a safe environment to nurture artistic freedom.

Scott Banister

Chairman & Co-Founder

Scott built his career by identifying new markets and shaping innovative products for them. In 1995, he identified search engines as a significant advertising medium and invented the first products to automate marketing across multiple search engines, ultimately creating the bid-for-placement business model used by GoTo/Overture (and now Google AdWords) and serving as VP Ideas at GoTo-incubator Idealab. As an initial investor and Director at PayPal, he was a co-inventor of the ‘email payments’ product now widely used on eBay. In 2000, Scott saw opportunity in the unbounded growth of email traffic, co-founding IronPort Systems and serving as CTO. Now the market leader in anti-spam technology, IronPort was acquired by Cisco Systems for $830 million in 2007.

Matt Carr

Rails Hacker

Matt is Zivity's resident rock star; not in the annoying, "this guy is a rock star at coding Java" sense, but in the, "No, he actually toured the U.S. in some band you've never heard of" sense.

Matt makes software, music, and lovingly tends both the office bonsai collection and our codebase.

James Downs

Scalability Guru

James is our Super Mario of scaling. He's the magical plumber who can solve any systems problem, whether in rails, unix, radius, or gopher.

James has worked for eBay, Sprint, Wells Fargo, Texaco, and Vodafone in Japan, Germany, Spain, and England, supporting users in Romania, Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia. James also has a pilot's license and can pull 4 G's without straining. He scales both horizontally and diagonally, but not vertically.

Wil Everts

Front-End Wizard, Griddle fanatic

It’s not that Wil can’t tell if he’s dreaming or awake, he just always approaches life that way "...just in case." His enthusiastic energy is contagious, energy he’s used to produce cleanly-coded web views way past bedtime for over a decade now.

You might know him as the first blogger transmitted into space, or the guy who moved to the rockies one winter for 120 days of powder, or maybe you don't know Wil. (Had you considered that?)

Alex Choi

Ruby on Rails Icebeast

A technical aspirant from birth, Alex has programmed machines (including VCRs, calculators, and computers) from a young age. More recently, Alex has become a giant plastic cube dweller, a human garbage disposal, and a wizard impersonator.

Alex led tech support at UC Berkeley and coding projects at various small companies around the bay area. Enjoy his essays on all things geek at his various outlets.