Greg Badros joins BigSpring, the mobile learning and productivity startup, as Advisor

Badros comes on board at an exciting time in the company’s journey as it is scaling its operations globally and will soon expand its customer focus from large enterprises to include Small and Medium businesses as well as consumers.

“We’re absolutely thrilled to have Greg believe in our mission and come on board as an Advisor. As part of the team that developed Gmail and Google Adsense, as well as being a senior executive running Product and Engineering for Facebook thereby shaping the platform in its early days, he is one of the few technology executives who truly understands what it takes to build products for global scale and deliver a world class user experience. Given his experience at Google, he sees that what we are trying to do is transform learning into a key business driver through precise measurement of business impact much like Google did with advertising two decades ago.

Greg is a seasoned mind in the tech space who has been lending his wisdom and expertise to startups such as ours. His perspective and experience will be invaluable in our success story as we attempt to tackle employability on a global scale,” says Bhakti Vithalani, BigSpring’s Founder and CEO .

Greg Badros, worked at Google for over six years where he was a Senior Director of Engineering, having led AdSense from 2004-2007 and then the Gmail+ and Google Apps teams from 2007-2009. From June 2009 to October 2013, Greg worked at Facebook where he was VP Engineering & Products and led numerous teams including Ads, Search, Photos, Messages, Growth, Data Infrastructure and Data Science. After his nearly 4.5 years at Facebook, he founded Prepared Mind Innovations and now acts as an Advisor to several startup companies and builds prototypes himself. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the non-profit Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

“I enjoy working with Founders I believe in, trying to solve important global problems differently and thoughtfully. Bhakti and BigSpring fit this description. I can’t wait to help Bhakti and the BigSpring team enable people the world over to develop employable skills towards a better quality of life. BigSpring is a great example of what excites me about technology innovation today: Founders confronting some of the world’s biggest and most important problems head on." said Badros.

Also on the Advisory board at BigSpring is Shailesh Rao, a Partner at TPG, responsible for its Growth and Social Impact portfolio across sectors in India and Southeast Asia. “When we worked together at Google, I was always impressed by Greg’s ability to build great teams and cultures, think strategically at global scale, and execute having been a key leader in the development of two of the most iconic technology products in the world - Gmail and AdSense. I am excited about the prospect of Greg bringing his unique talents to help the team at BigSpring solve one of the most important problems facing the world today," said Rao.

Greg Badros earned his Bachelors’ degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Duke University. After founding the engineering team at a successful startup, he started graduate school and earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle. Starting from age 14, Greg has accumulated over twenty research and trade publications and has spoken at numerous conferences internationally. His research interests include software engineering, declarative representations and constraint satisfaction, distributed systems, programming language design and implementation, and mechanism design for online advertising auctions. His Ph.D. work on the Cassowary Constraint Solving algorithm is now an integral part of Apple’s iOS and OS X. In his free time, he enjoys tennis, skiing, and home automation.

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About BigSpring

BigSpring is a mobile learning and productivity platform focused on demonstrating ROI from training.BigSpring addresses a top challenge that business leaders face - connecting training to business outcomes. The platform enables enterprises to deliver learning, from management to shop floor, and quantify the impact on business. The turnkey solution also offers a large and growing content library covering operational and service-related skills in multiple languages as well as custom content tailored to specific business needs. BigSpring has garnered 500,000 users in 5 countries in less than 2 years, with clients such as Uber, United Technologies, and others.

Bhakti Vithalani, Founder and CEO, has worked in product development at Siebel (now Oracle), and as a management consultant in McKinsey's High Tech and Corporate Finance practices in major global markets. She holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineeringfrom Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from The Wharton School. BigSpring’s Advisors include Shailesh Rao, Partner at TPG, former VP of International Operations at Twitter and MD of Google India; Greg Badros, former VP of Engineering and Products at Facebook and Senior Engineering Director at Google.

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