Starting OkCupid and Pursuing a PhD in Parallel

Speaker: Max Krohn

Date: Thursday, October 31, 2013

Time: 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM Note: all times are in the Eastern Time Zone

Refreshments: 2:45 PM

Public: Yes

Location: 32-G449 Patil/Kiva

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Contact: Jean Yang, jeanyang@csail.mit.edu

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Reminder Subject: TALK: Starting OkCupid and Pursuing a PhD in Parallel

Max Krohn started OkCupid along with three friends in 2003, right around the time he began the grad program at MIT. For much of his time at MIT, he pursued research and practical applications in parallel and saw cross-fertilization between the two. The OK Web Server and the Tame C++ Event System were both built to solve specific problems at OkCupid, but became more general research projects. And it was an offhand remark by the chief of product at OkCupid -- "why can't we just open source this whole site?" -- that helped launch a multi-year, multi-institution investigation into information flow control for web sites at the operating system level.

In this talk, Max will discuss the history of OkCupid, his personal history as a CSAIL grad student, and how the two intertwined. He will cover OkCupid's scrappy and parsimonious approach to systems technology and some of the website's published social scientific results.

Bio: Max Krohn (PhD 2008) was the co-founder and CTO of TheSpark.com, SparkNotes.com and OkCupid.com. He currently lives in New York City, where he works on new startup opportunities.

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Created by Jean Yang at Wednesday, October 02, 2013 at 3:26 PM.