Algebraix Data Leadership

CEO – Charles H. Silver

Mr. Silver has been building companies and creating liquidity events for shareholders for over 25 years. In the late 1990s, as cofounder of RealAge, Inc., he built the company from scratch, conceived its business plan, raised over $15 million in capital, negotiated key strategic relationships and, most importantly, positioned the company for profitability, which enabled it to survive the dot com bust. In 2007, RealAge was sold very successfully to the Hearst Corporation.

Prior to RealAge, Mr. Silver founded and built the Oil Dispatch franchise in Michigan. It grew to be the largest independent quick-oil-change operator in the state and was successfully sold to Jiffy Lube. After graduating from the University of Michigan, and prior to his entrepreneurial career, Mr. Silver served for two years as a staff member for a United States Congressman.

COO – Rich Benci

Rich Benci has more than 20 years of executive level experience in sales, marketing and operations in the technology and digital media industries. Rich has been part of 5 start-ups — with 4 reaching successful exits:  AVCOM (acquired by Rand Worldwide); PersonaLogic (by AOL); MyPoints (via IPO); and RealAge (by Hearst).  Rich also held senior positions in Sharecare, IBM’s Lotus Development and Hitachi’s AIS group.

Prior to Algebraix, Mr. Benci was the Executive VP for Sharecare responsible for creating interactive programs and managing relationships with partners, agencies and clients.  Rich was formerly the president of RealAge, Inc. and led the RealAge team from the dot com bust in 2000 through 7 consecutive years of profitability and growth.  Rich was responsible for the company’s operations including:  technology, product development, member services, marketing, and sales.  RealAge was successfully acquired by Hearst Magazines in 2007.

Principal Mathematician – Gary J. Sherman, Ph.D.

Gary Sherman’s expertise in modern algebra, linear algebra, probability theory, topology and functional analysis uniquely qualified him to develop the set algebras that are at the heart of ALGEBRAIX technology. During his 35-year tenure at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, he served for six years as Chairman of the Department of Mathematics. During this period, he also served for 11 years as a reviewer for the American Mathematical Society and for 12 years as a Visiting Lecturer for the Society of Industrial & Applied Mathematics. Gary received his B.S. and M.A. degrees in Mathematics from Bowling Green University, and a Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from Indiana University.

Vice President, Product Marketing – Barbara Starr

Recruited from a teaching positions while studying for her doctoral degree, to build expert trading systems on Wall Street, Barbara Starr has worked in the area of Semantic Technologies for the past 2 decades in many domains and has watched the evolution of the Semantic web. She subsequently spent almost a decade at SAIC, and was PI for many government projects (including acquaint which led to Watson, HPKB, which was the genesis for the semantic web) and others. After starting her own consulting business, she then continued to work with DARPA and SAIC. Overstock was her first foray into the e-commerce and SEO world, and she has not looked back since!

Starr is a published author and conference speaker at SEMTech as well as SMX. She is the founder of the Semantic Web Meetup in San Diego CA, as well as several other global meetups and frequently speaks at other Semantic Web Meetups. She is also a published Search Engine Land author.

VP of Engineering – William A. Rogers, Ph.D.

William A. Rogers, Ph.D., P.E. was previously the technical and team lead at Algebraix Data for the SparqlServer optimizer design and implementation. Prior to that he was solely responsible for the design and implementation of the optimizer in A2DB – the SQL predecessor of SparqlServer. Dr. Rogers contributions have been critical to achieving record breaking benchmark results with both SparqlServer and A2DB.

Prior to joining Algebraix Data Dr. Rogers co-invented Adaptive Automated Testing and co-founded AberroTest. The genesis of AberroTest came from Dr. Rogers’s previous experience as VP of Research and Development for X.HLP, Inc., a small multinational software company. At X.HLP, Dr. Rogers found one of the most intractable problem areas was in improving the software quality process. This problem began his analysis of how test automation could be improved. After leaving X.HLP in 2002, Dr. Rogers began work on this problem with his partner, Joe Barta, and developed the concepts and technology that became AberroTest.

Before X.HLP, Dr. Rogers formed and ran a small software company, Austin Decisions, which developed a Microsoft Office Compatible–certified decision-analysis tool. Dr. Rogers also ran his own successful consulting and contract software development business and served as an expert witness in the areas of software patents and intellectual property.

Prior to entering the business world, Dr. Rogers was an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught hardware and software design. His research specialty is automated test generation and fault simulation algorithms for integrated circuits.

Dr. Rogers’s accomplishments include three Semiconductor Research Corporation awards for excellence, over 30 scholarly publications, graduation of five Ph.D. students, numerous master’s degree students, and two patents. Bill is also a registered professional engineer in the state of Texas and has served on the boards and advisory boards of several Texas software companies.