Charlie Cheever

Charlie Cheever (born August 2, 1981) is the co-founder,[1] along with Adam D'Angelo, of Quora, an online knowledge market.[2] He was formerly an engineer and manager at Facebook, where he oversaw the creation of Facebook Connect and the Facebook Platform.[3] Prior to Facebook, Cheever was employed by Amazon.com in Seattle. He left Facebook to start Quora in June 2009.[1] He stepped down from active management of Quora in September 2012 but remains an advisor.[4] In 2016 it was announced that he is working as the CEO of Expo.io (formally known as Exponent), a startup company that is a, "translation machine for mobile app code".[2][5]

Cheever is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and is a graduate of Harvard College, B.A. in Computer Science. He is a member of the Fly Club.[1]

Education

Charlie Cheever attended Shady Side Academy for high school.

He attended Harvard University from 1999 to 2003 where he graduated with a B.A. in Computer Science.[6]

Controversy

In 2000 Cheever was brought in front of Harvard’s Administrative Board for creating a database of the Harvard student body. The program enabled students to find which dorm their fellow classmates were living in. The database was quickly shut down by the Harvard administration.[7]

A few years later Cheever's project partially inspired fellow Harvard alum Mark Zuckerberg to create the website Facesmash.[7] Zuckerberg later said that he considered Cheever to be a “kindred spirit”.[7]

Facebook

Zuckerberg later recruited Cheever away from Amazon to be an early engineer at Facebook. This hire, along with 3 others was part of an initiative to shift the focus at Facebook.[8]

Cheever and Adam D’Angelo were responsible for most of the critical programming work involved with turning Facebook from a website into a platform.[8] Most notably Cheever worked on Facebook Connect Authentication, the gaming platform at Facebook, and Facebook Video.[9]

Cheever quickly became known as a top engineer at Facebook after creating one of the most important internal tools bunnylol. The Python tool is still used today by every engineer at Facebook.[9]

Angel Investing

Cheever is an active angel investor. He has currently invested in over 32 startups, including the San Francisco based online home-selling service Opendoor.

Cheever is also co-invested with Jared Leto in the human resources service Zenefits.

Expo

In early 2015 Charlie Cheever and James Ide started an open source project Expo. The software enables developers to create cross-platform native applications with JavaScript and React Native.

Cheever is currently working full-time as the president of Expo.

References

  1. ^ a b c d Hempel, Jessi; Kowitt, Beth; Mangalindan, JP (July 9, 2010). "The smartest people in tech - Engineer runners-up: Cheever and D'Angelo (22)". Fortune Magazine. CNN. Archived from the original on September 12, 2010. Retrieved 2010-10-10.
  2. ^ a b Kokalitcheva, Kia (2016-08-23). "Quora's Co-Founder Is Back In the Startup Game at Y Combinator". Fortune. Retrieved 2017-04-06.
  3. ^ Charlie Cheever at Crunchbase
  4. ^ TechCrunch: Quora Co-Founder Charlie Cheever Steps Back From Day-To-Day Role At The Company
  5. ^ Claburn, Thomas (9 Mar 2017). "Apple empties gas can, strikes match, burns bridge to hot-patch apps". The Registar. Situation Publishing. Retrieved 2017-04-06.
  6. ^ David Kirkpatrick (2010). The Facebook Effect.
  7. ^ a b c David Kirkpatrick (2010). The Facebook Effect. p. 158.
  8. ^ a b David Kirkpatrick (2010). The Facebook Effect. p. 220.
  9. ^ a b https://dazeinfo.com/2018/08/02/happy-birthday-charlie-cheever-quora/