Gil Elbaz is an accomplished entrepreneur and pioneer of natural language technology and structured data ecosystems. Gil is passionate about building scalable information systems that drive innovative application development which ultimately enables better decision-making.
In 1991, Gil earned his bachelor's degree from Caltech, with a double major in Engineering/Applied Science and Economics. After college, Gil worked in engineering roles at IBM, Sybase, and SGI. In 1998, he co-founded Applied Semantics (ASI). ASI helped define and build new addressable markets with its AdSense and other contextual advertising products. The company was acquired by Google in 2003, at which point Gil became Director of Engineering for the Santa Monica office. His work there helped establish Google's place as a leader in the field of online advertising. In 2007, Gil left Google to start Los Angeles-based Factual Inc., an open data platform founded to maximize data accuracy, transparency, and availability.
Active in a number of nonprofit areas, Gil is on the board of trustees for the X Prize Foundation and Caltech, and a member of the Los Angeles Social Ventures Partners. He and his wife, Elyssa, also manage the Elbaz Family Foundation, supporting environmental and educational causes.
As the VP of Marketing and Operations at Factual, Eva manages all aspects of the brand, revenue generation, HR and finance. In 2008, she co-founded Navigating Cancer, a suite of tools and content that empowers cancer patients to navigate their best care. She is also very active in the non-profit sector, founding Whole Child LA in 2008, a community pediatric pain clinic, and sits on the board of First Descents and Iridescent. She also serves as an advisor for WebFWD, Mucker Lab, Common Crawl and newMe Accelerator. Prior, she was a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Google and Youtube for 5 years. Prior to Google, Eva was the head of marketing for Applied Semantics, a company that was sold to Google in 2003. Additional past employers include The Wilkerson Group, Procter & Gamble and IBM. Eva holds an MBA from the Cornell University Johnson School of Management as well as an AB in Biology from Harvard University.
Bill joined Factual in 2009 and prior to that, worked at Yahoo! for about six years, the last two of which he was the GM and Senior Director of the Yahoo! Search Platform. Here, he managed the product management, design, marketing and business development functions for Yahoo! BOSS, which grew from inception to over +1B queries/month. Before this he was the Director of Int'l Search Business Operations & Product Strategy, a +$1B P&L with 500+ employees. Other experience includes Equity Research Associate at UBS on the #1 ranked Institutional Investor telecom research team. At one point he wore a white coat and worked in a solid-state physics research lab. He has an MBA from Columbia University Business School and a BA in Geology from Colby College.
Boris took his first programming course in the seventh grade and wrote a video game as his first class project. Prior to joining Factual, he was CTO at Xap, which he helped build from eight employees to a thriving business with millions of users, and over a hundred employees. His junior year in college, he built a site that quickly became the web’s 27th most trafficked and then optimized it enough to run from two machines in his den. He’s not retired now because he really wanted to graduate. Boris holds a BS in Physiological Science and an MS in Computer Science, both from UCLA. He put himself through school working night shifts as an ambulance driver. Boris lives in Los Angeles with his badass wife and three amazing children. He is a lousy philosopher, a mediocre poet, and will someday become a great chef.