General Cybernetics, Inc.

Paul Pangaro Co-Founder and CEO

Paul Pangaro is responsible for the product vision and day-to-day operations of GCI.

His career spans product strategy, prescriptive innovation, and organizational dynamics, with roles as technology executive, professor of cybernetics, entrepreneur, and performer. He spent ten years in Silicon Valley as CTO and strategy consultant to startups, and as Distinguished Market Strategist at Sun Microsystems.

Through prototyping, lecturing and writing, Paul’s career has focused on the cognitive and social needs of human beings. He taught a course at Stanford University for seven years and in the Interaction Design MFA program at the School of the Visual Arts since 2010, and has lectured on his approach to conversation software in São Paulo, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Toronto, and in cities in the US.

Paul studied computer science and humanities at MIT, where he made award-winning computer-generated films. Nicholas Negroponte hired him to work in what became the MIT Media Lab. He earned a Ph.D. in cybernetics and conversation theory at Brunel University with Gordon Pask.

Pantelis Colakis Head of Business Development

Pantelis is responsible for partnerships, business procurement and customer acquisition, and he contributes to strategy and product design.

Before joining GCI, Pantelis spent 4 years navigating the stormy waters of Wall Street as mergers and acquisitions analyst.

Pantelis received a Bachelor of Business Administration (concentrating in finance) from Boston University and earned his MBA from Copenhagen Business School. During the MBA, Pantelis worked in teams consulting with tech startups on strategy and business development.

John KatagawaDirector of Engineering

John Katagawa is responsible for all of GCI's front-end coding and all back-end Java as well as managing Amazon Web Services.

John has 15 years of experience as a developer. He worked at the agency R/GA on web implementation and was prototype designer/developer for IBM's UX group and ibm.com. In addition to visual and UX design skills and expertise in cloud services management, he has extensive experience in back-end coding including Java, databases, and open-source servers, as well as front-end coding in JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5.

Mark Johnson Advisor

Mark Johnson advises GCI on product and investment strategy.

Mark is a technology executive and entrepreneur who has worked at four successful startups.

Most recently, Mark was the CEO of Zite, which he sold twice: first to CNN in 2011 and then from CNN to Flipboard in 2014. Prior to Zite, Mark worked for SideStep (a travel search engine acquired by Kayak for $180M in 2007), Kosmix (a social media platform acquired by Walmart for $300M in 2011), and Powerset (a natural language search company acquired by Microsoft for $100M in 2008). Through the Microsoft acquisition of Powerset, Mark led program management at the San Francisco office of Bing.

Mark studied philosophy at Stanford University.

Adrian Gropper, M.D. Advisor

Adrian Gropper advises GCI on consumer privacy, fair information practice and business development.

His career as a medical device entrepreneur includes numerous start-ups including two public exits. More recently, he has shifted focus to technology policy in healthcare, including CTO of the national patient advocacy non-profit Patient Privacy Rights; Board member and Management Council delegate to federal NSTIC / IDESG cybersecurity initiative; architect in federal health information exchange policy; and technology policy architect for the MA Medical Society.

A common thread of his start-ups and his policy work has been a focus on the individual physician or patient rather than the institution. This perspective is increasingly relevant to scaling Big Data initiatives and The Internet of Things.

Adrian studied mechanical engineering and applied software at MIT. He earned his MD degree from Harvard Medical School.

Walter Lee Co-founder

Walter’s functional expertise is in product planning and strategy, corporate development, and business analytics; he has a deep industry background in all forms of online collaboration and business intelligence.

Walter has worked in companies ranging from corporate giants to raw startups, but always at the cutting edge of technology. At IBM/Lotus, he was the business head of the Lotus Institute, where he led the development and commercialization of major collaborative offerings in the areas of online communities of interest, creativity and innovation, and expertise finding and sharing. He subsequently joined Communispace (then a raw startup, now the premier organizer of customer innovation communities) as VP of Strategic Alliances.

Walter worked as an analyst at Burton Group in the area of business intelligence where he analyzed market and technology trends.

Peter Paine Co-Founder

His experience spans wide areas of technology such as rapid prototyping, simulation, search, exploration petrophysics, agriculture and agricultural engineering, archival photography, neurophysiology, and requirements capture.

Peter has worked as a strategic consultant with a focus on innovation, design and user experience and is recognized for both his problem-solving and future-focused thinking. Clients have included the UK Government, Guinness, WPP plc, Progressive Corks pty, Baker Research Institute, Sun Microsystems, Cryo Interactive Entertainment, La Locale TV, and Goldman Sachs. He has worked in organizations such as Dresser Industries (as senior ultra hostile environment engineer) and Racal Electronics plc (as principle engineer).

Projects have included systems integration of a multi-user Lisp architecture, a school timetable scheduling system, automatic requirements capture, command and control systems, next generation search tools and interface design, games intelligence, temporal and spatial modeling, and information visualization.