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Ali aydar

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Ali Aydar
Occupation(s)COO, imeem
Known forearly Napster, SNOCAP employee

Ali Aydar is an entrepreneur. He is best known for his role as an early employee at the original Napster and at SNOCAP, the digital rights and content management startup founded by Shawn Fanning after Napster. He is currently the chief operating officer at the social music site imeem, which acquired SNOCAP in 2008.

Aydar's experiences working for Napster were documented in two books: Joseph Menn's definitive Napster biography, All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster[1], and Steve Knopper's "Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age."[2]

Biography

Ali Aydar was born in Virgina and grew up in Napoleon, Michigan. After graduation, he attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he majored in mathematics and computer science.

While at Carnegie Mellon, Aydar was a contributor to the Internet Free Chess Server, a open-source project that enabled people to play online chess for free. This experience led to a job offer with Chess.net, an online chess startup founded by John Fanning, the uncle of Napster creator Shawn Fanning. John Fanning hired Aydar as a Chess.net employee in 1995.

While working for John Fanning at Chess.net, Aydar first met Fanning's 15-year old nephew, Shawn. In All the Rave, Joseph Menn notes that Shawn interned for Chess.net in the summer of 1997, sleeping on a couch in the living room. That summer, Aydar and the other Chess.net employees became close with the younger Fanning, who was just learning computer programming. Aydar bought Fanning his first book on programming in C++, the language he would use two years later to build the Napster file-sharing software.

Napster

After leaving Chess.net, Aydar moved to Chicago, where he worked as a banker[3]. In early 1999, Shawn Fanning contacted Aydar via instant messenger to tell him about a software application he was writing that would enable people to share music. Aydar's initial reaction was unenthusiastic; he told Fanning "Stop wasting your time. No one's ever going to share an MP3" and encouraged him to concentrate on school.[4]

That summer, Aydar moved to California's Silicon Valley to work for a startup. Within months, he was recruited to join Napster, the file-sharing company founded by Shawn Fanning and his uncle John. He joined the company in September 1999, becoming its first non-founding employee and the first hire in California.[5]

Initially, Aydar was an individual contributor to Napster's engineering team. He wrote the Napster search engine, a critical contribution that led to the service's rapid growth by making it easy to find virtually any song, and engineered the server software infrastructure critical to supporting Napster's unprecedented growth. At its peak, Napster had 85 million registered users and 2 million simultaneous users around the world[6]; at that time, it was the fastest growing application in the history of the Internet.[7]

Eventually, Aydar moved into a management role as Napster's senior director of technology, where he was responsible for managing the development of Napster's next generation legal service.[8]

SNOCAP

Following Napster's shutdown and subsequent bankruptcy, Ali joined Shawn Fanning and Napster alumni Jordan Ritter at SNOCAP, the digital rights and content management startup Fanning founded after Napster's collapse. A significant number of its employees were people who had worked for the original Napster; an August 2005 SNOCAP profile in TIME magazine noted that "27% of SNOCAP's employees are Napster veterans."[9]

Aydar served as SNOCAP's chief operating officer from the company's inception through its acquisition by imeem in 2008, and also served for a year as its interim CEO in the company's early days. He co-invented SNOCAP's digital registry and MyStore technologies.[10]

imeem

Ali joined imeem as part of its acquisition of SNOCAP in April 2008[11], and currently serves as the company's chief operating officer. He was an early advisor to imeem, serving on its board of directors from 2003 until 2007.

Aydar is currently an advisor to casual gaming site Sporcle and sits on the company’s board of directors. Previously, he has served in consulting or advisory capacities for several technology start-ups including Picasa and Sapphire Mobile Systems.

Education

Ali earned a B.S. in mathematics/computer science, with a special concentration in technology-based entrepreneurship, from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, and has an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley’s Walter A. Haas School of Business.

References

  1. ^ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/04/27/RV106502.DTL
  2. ^ http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2009/jan/02/napster-wounds-the-giant/
  3. ^ http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2009/jan/02/napster-wounds-the-giant/
  4. ^ http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2009/jan/02/napster-wounds-the-giant/
  5. ^ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/12/03/BUG6HA5HFM1.DTL
  6. ^ http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/testimony.cfm?id=1624&wit_id=4688
  7. ^ http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-246648.html
  8. ^ http://www.snocap.com/about/management/index.php?profile=ali
  9. ^ http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1090912,00.html
  10. ^ http://www.linkedin.com/in/aydar
  11. ^ http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/07/imeem-confirms-snocap-acquisition/
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