Gary Chevsky (born 11 September 1972 in

Odessa Odesa (also spelled Odessa) is the third most populous city and municipality in Ukraine and a major seaport and transport hub located in the south-west of the country, on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. The city is also the administrativ ...

USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nati ...

) is an American entrepreneur, engineer and was the founding architect of Ask.com. He served as President at

Tango Tango is a partner dance and social dance that originated in the 1880s along the Río de la Plata, the natural border between Argentina and Uruguay. The tango was born in the impoverished port areas of these countries as the result of a combina ...

mobile video and audio-over-IP calling service for consumers, before founding a Social Virtual Reality company StayUp Inc.

Career

In 1992, Chevsky was hired by Garrett Gruener, fellow Berkeley grad and eventual co-founder, to help write programing for the Ask Jeeves concept site. After parting ways, he went on to work for

Informix IBM Informix is a product family within IBM's Information Management division that is centered on several relational database management system (RDBMS) offerings. The Informix products were originally developed by Informix Corporation, whose ...

before reconnecting with Gruener in 1995. From 1995 to 2006, Chevsky worked on

question answering Question answering (QA) is a computer science discipline within the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP), which is concerned with building systems that automatically answer questions posed by humans in a natural ...

and information-retrieval technologies at

Ask Jeeves Ask.com (originally known as Ask Jeeves) is a question answering–focused e-business founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky, from his own design. Wart ...

(now Ask.com). Subsequently, he served as Vice President of Engineering at

Symantec Corporation Gen Digital Inc. (formerly Symantec Corporation and NortonLifeLock) is a multinational software company co-headquartered in Tempe, Arizona and Prague, Czech Republic. The company provides cybersecurity software and services. Gen is a Fortune 50 ...

in its Consumer Business Unit (known for its Norton brand), developing web security technologies such as

Norton Safe Web Norton Safe Web (sometimes abbreviated NSW) is a service developed by Symantec Corporation that is designed to help users identify malicious websites. Safe Web delivers information about websites based on automated analysis and user feedback. T ...

. From 2009 to 2011, he served as Vice President of Product Development, Operations & IT for

YouSendIt Hightail, formerly YouSendIt, is a cloud service that lets users send and receive digitally sign and synchronize files. YouSendIt.com and YouSendIt Inc. were founded in 2004; the company renamed itself Hightail in 2013. The company's early focu ...

(now

Hightail Hightail, formerly YouSendIt, is a cloud service that lets users send and receive digitally sign and synchronize files. YouSendIt.com and YouSendIt Inc. were founded in 2004; the company renamed itself Hightail in 2013. The company's early foc ...

). In July 2011, Chevsky was hired at Tango.me, a video calling company, to oversee engineering. Chevsky went on to become the President of Tango, which during his tenure grew from less than 10 million to over 400 million users worldwide. In 2017, Chevsky envisioned the future of video communication in

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), edu ...

and started an effort at Tango around Social VR, eventually leading the spin-off of the project into a stand-alone company StayUp Inc., with Chevsky as founder and CEO. StayUp wa
acquired in 2018
by

IMVU IMVU (, stylized as imvu) is an online virtual world and social networking site. IMVU was founded in 2004 and was originally backed by venture investors Menlo Ventures, AllegisCyber Capital, Bridgescale Partners, and Best Buy Capital.

, a social 3D world company, with Chevsky coming onboard as an executive advisor. In 2021, he joined

RingCentral RingCentral, Inc. is an American publicly traded provider of cloud-based communication and collaboration products and services for businesses. CEO Vlad Shmunis and CTO Vlad Vendrow founded the company in 1999. Investors included Doug Leone, Se ...

as Vice President of Collaboration.

Personal life

He immigrated to the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

in 1988 and settled in

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

. Chevsky studied

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

at the University of California Berkeley. He holds 5 patents in the area of natural language processing and search/information retrieval, and is also featured Searching for Profit: Gary Chevsky: Banners and Pop-Ups
/ref> in the Search Engine exhibit in the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact o ...

in Mountain View, CA.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chevsky, Gary 1972 births Living people Ukrainian emigrants to the United States American computer scientists UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni