Tikhon Bernstam (born 1979) is an American Internet

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entreprene ...

who cofounded the companies

Scribd Scribd Inc. (pronounced ) operates three primary platforms: Scribd, Everand, and SlideShare. Scribd is a digital document library that hosts over 195 million documents. Everand is a digital content subscription service offering a wide selectio ...

and

Parse Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is a process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar by breaking it into parts. The term ''pa ...

Background

Bernstam grew up in Palo Alto, California and then attended

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College ( ) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the America ...

, where he studied

economics Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interac ...

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

, and

physics Physics is the scientific study of matter, its Elementary particle, fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge whi ...

and graduated summa cum laude. Bernstam attended the

Y Combinator Y Combinator, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 5,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, Californi ...

program in 2006, launching

. He went on to attend the Y Combinator program again in 2011, this time co-founding

, a platform to help mobile developers create mobile applications. Bernstam is also an

Angel investor An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible de ...

and has invested in over 50 companies so far, including

Optimizely Optimizely is an American company that provides digital experience platform software as a service. Optimizely provides A/B testing and multivariate testing tools, website personalization, and feature toggle capabilities, as well as web content ...

, Scentbird and Crowdtilt. In 2012,

Business Insider ''Business Insider'' (stylized in all caps: BUSINESS INSIDER; known from 2021 to 2023 as INSIDER) is a New York City–based multinational financial and business news website founded in 2007. Since 2015, a majority stake in ''Business Inside ...

named Bernstam one of the top 15 CEOs to watch.

Scribd.com

In 2006, Tikhon Bernstam and partners

Trip Adler John R. "Trip" Adler III is an American tech executive who has served as the chief executive officer (CEO) of Created by Humans since 2024. Previously, he co-founded Scribd in 2007, where he seved as the CEO until 2023. Early life and educatio ...

and Jared Friedman started

, the world's largest document sharing site and a top 250 most visited site on the internet. Sometimes called the "YouTube for Documents,"

allows you to upload, share, and embed documents of almost any format. More than 80 million active users visit the world's largest digital library each month. Over 150 publishers, including

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is a British–American publishing company that is considered to be one of the "Big Five (publishers), Big Five" English-language publishers, along with Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group USA, Hachette, Macmi ...

Random House Random House is an imprint and publishing group of Penguin Random House. Founded in 1927 by businessmen Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer as an imprint of Modern Library, it quickly overtook Modern Library as the parent imprint. Over the foll ...

, Wiley, Workman, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson, Harvard University Press and

Stanford University Press Stanford University Press (SUP) is the publishing house of Stanford University. It is one of the oldest academic presses in the United States and the first university press to be established on the West Coast. It is currently a member of the Ass ...

are associated with

Parse.com

Parse is a cloud application platform powering tens of thousands of apps, including those for Cadillac, the Green Bay Packers, Home Depot, and the Food Network.

Fast Company ''Fast Company'' is an American business magazine published monthly in print and online, focusing on technology, business, and design. It releases six print issues annually. History ''Fast Company'' was founded in November 1995 by Alan Webb ...

named Parse one of the top 50 most innovative companies of 2013. Parse was founded in 2011 by Tikhon Bernstam, Ilya Sukhar, James Yu, and Kevin Lacker, a small group of seasoned Googlers and

alums who got together to build a useful set of back-end tools for mobile developers. Parse offers services that help mobile developers store data in the cloud, manage identity log-ins, handle push notifications and run custom code in the cloud. Facebook acquired Parse for $85 million in 2013.

References

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External links

Tikhon Bernstam's Homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bernstam, Tikhon 1979 births Angel investors American venture capitalists American information technology businesspeople Dartmouth College alumni Living people Businesspeople from Palo Alto, California Place of birth missing (living people)