Diffbot Team

Welcome Will Hare – Sales Development Representative

Hello everyone! William (Hare) here, but you can call me Will. I will be joining the sales team at Diffbot as a Sales Development Representative. I am looking forward to meeting everyone – eventually in person – and welcome any opportunity now for a virtual get-together. 

I have always been interested in problem solving and negotiation for mutual benefit, i.e sales! I was actually hired for my first sales job at 14 years old when I was hanging out at the local lacrosse store and started talking with customers about equipment. Ultimately, I was able to refine my skills to not only guide people into the gear and “cosmetics” that would fit them best, but also learned to love the client facing aspect of the job. 

As I moved through college at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, I became very interested in technology. I was able to work an internship with a team doing inside sales at Uber for a new project for on demand delivery, and fell in love with the sales development process. After that internship, I went into the wine industry and worked as a tasting room associate at a local winery, learning as much as I could about wine, the industry, and the nuances of pouring. After I graduated, I became the first Sales Development Representative at a small social engagement start-up in Palo Alto working directly with the CEO on sales development and strategy. Once I saw the breadth of Diffbot and understood its mission, I was immediately intrigued. I now consider myself extremely fortunate to be a part of the team!

On a personal note, I love hiking, snowboarding, and wine. I also coach high school lacrosse (go PALY Vikings). Once we are back in the office, I am looking forward to using the pool table and organizing a tournament. 

I’m absolutely thrilled to join the sales team at Diffbot and engage with prospective clients to understand the power and vision of the company!

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Kevin Luu

Welcome Jerome Choo – Director of Growth Marketing

Hello! My name is Jerome Choo and I lead Growth Marketing at Diffbot. I spent the majority of my childhood in Singapore, eventually moving to Atlanta, GA, for high school and college where I started a career in biomedical engineering. My research focus, mostly unintended, was on mammal urination. Since then, I’ve found a new passion in leading data driven growth teams. I’m fascinated with blending objective scientific rigor and problem first design to create seven star user experiences. I’m pumped to help Diffbot solve the absolutely essential function of accessible structured data for everyone!

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Kevin Luu

Welcome Andrew Harrold – Data Curator

Hello! My name is Andrew Harrold, a new data curator at Diffbot!

I was born and raised in Denver Colorado, and studied economics at the University of California, Berkeley. During my time at Berkeley, I took on a senior thesis which involved looking at the relationship between employee sentiment (scraped employee review data) and stock market returns.

Needless to say, I have a passion for data and love the many creative ways it can be used to derive meaningful insights; specifically within machine learning and web-scraping technology. Diffbot takes on the challenge of exracting data to find meaning out of chaos and can be used to help a wide range of businesses solve problems— which I am all about. I am very excited to join a talented team with such awesome technology!


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Kevin Luu

Welcome Maosheng Guo – Machine Learning Engineer

Hello there! My name is Maosheng Guo and I am from China. I had just started recently as a Machine Learning Engineer in the research group. It’s my great pleasure to join the Diffbot family!

When pursuing my Ph.D. at the Harbin Institute of Technology, I focused my research on recognition, extraction and generating the reasoning relations in natural language (i.e., Textual Entailment and Natural Language Inference). During this time, I successfully improved several question-answering and dialogue systems/chatbots using inference techniques. On the one hand, reasoning in natural language is inseparable from the accumulation of knowledge. On the other hand, inference techniques also help the construction of knowledge graphs. When I learned about the Diffbot’s mission to build the first comprehensive map of human knowledge, I decided to join without any hesitation.

As for my hobbies, I enjoy traveling and doing outdoor sports in my free time. When I am not outdoors, I also find playing online party games with friends exciting. I am excited to start my new adventure at Diffbot!

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Kevin Luu

Welcome Eriq Huang – UX Design Intern

Hi there! My name is Eriq Huang, a new User Experience (UX) Design intern at Diffbot!

I grew up in China. Currently, I am studying Web Design & New Media at Academy of Art University. I have been a visual designer for 6 years with multidisciplinary design skills in the area of UX, brand strategy, visual presentation, and ergonomics. The reason why UX is so fascinating to me is that I derive huge satisfaction by creating solutions that can positively impact people’s lives and their behavior.

As for my hobbies, I’m currently diving into aerial cinematography. I take my equipment with me whenever I travel so I can share stories of my journey.

Diffbot has solid technologies and approaches that solve the problem of acquiring human knowledge, and this is the exact problem that will be encountered whether in your daily life or business use cases. We possess a common vision of solving the user’s problem by addressing technology and design into sophisticated solutions. This is the reason why I joined Diffbot. I hope that I can contribute my own strength to the team by utilizing my multidisciplinary design approaches.

I look forward to starting my new journey here at Diffbot!

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Kevin Luu

Welcome Ben Lin – Account Executive

Hi Everyone! My name is Ben and I’m joining Diffbot as an Account Executive.

I grew up in the Bay Area and attended school at UC Berkeley studying economics. During my time there, I became interested in Data Science and Machine Learning and how this emerging field would play a key role in business operations. I knew I wanted to pursue a career that would enable me to work on both the technical and business sides of a product.

After graduation, I began working at a Machine Learning startup called Vidora. I dove right into sales being their only sales hire and worked closely with the CEO to prospect, generate meetings, and close deals. During my tenure at Vidora, I realized that I was missing the technical knowledge to resonate with Data Scientists, CTOs, and engineering teams. I then enrolled in a data science bootcamp, Metis, a 3 month full-time program that taught basic coding, statistics, and machine learning models and pipelines. Having experience in web scraping and data collection, Diffbot is truly building a world-class product and I’m excited to be a part of the team and contribute to the growth.

On a personal note – I love watching basketball (Go Dubs!), MMA, and going to concerts. I also enjoy hiking and adventuring so I try to go to at least one new trail every month. I look forward to my adventure here at Diffbot!

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Kevin Luu

Welcome Dan Urman – Lead Technical Support Engineer

Hi, folks! Dan here!

I’ve always been interested in psychology and technology. My first website was a bunch of personality tests from my high school psychology class implemented in JavaScript. These hobbies led me to a career in web development, but eventually I realized that the best part of my job was actually when I got to help colleagues solve whatever technical problems they’d run into in their own work. Because of that, I transitioned to technical product support and have never been happier.

Building websites is still a hobby of mine, and it’s given me frequent opportunity to lament how difficult it is to make use of the immense amount of human knowledge that exists on the internet. When I heard about Diffbot’s mission to collect and structure this knowledge to enable truly intelligent systems, I was immediately excited!

I’m thrilled to join Diffbot’s Technical Support Engineering team where I’ll be working to empower our customers to meet their goals and to improve the resources available to our developer community.

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Kevin Luu

Welcome Oliver Lehmberg – Machine Learning Engineer

Hi! My name is Oliver and I am a new Machine Learning Engineer at Diffbot!

I am from Germany and I have always been passionate about computer science as well as how to use computers to automate everyday tasks. After obtaining my master’s degree in Business Informatics, I joined the Data and Web Science Group at the University of Mannheim, where I worked on the large-scale integration of tabular data from web sites and knowledge graphs for five years.

I finished my PhD this year and will now work with the research team at Diffbot. My work here will continue in the area of large-scale data integration and focus on record linking and sub-record linking. These are critical tasks for the construction of knowledge graphs, as they determine which pieces of information from different source web sites are combined into the same entity, and how such entities are interlinked with each other.

In my free time I like to travel around the world and spend time with friends and family. I look forward to my new adventures at Diffbot!

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Kevin Luu

Welcome Tomer Balan – Senior Software Engineer

Hi there!

My name is Tomer, and I’m a new Senior Software Engineer at Diffbot! I am from Tel Aviv, Israel, a city with beautiful beaches, restaurants, bars, and a lot of technology.

As far back as I can remember, I have always been passionate about identifying and solving business problems using technology. For that reason, I chose to study Industrial and Management Engineering at Ben-Gurion University.

While working as a Data Solutions Engineer at eBay, I signed up for a Diffbot trial and was amazed by the product and technology. I found Diffbot’s technology to be helpful for many use-cases in the company. By day, I used the Analyze and Product API’s, and by night, I investigated the new Knowledge Graph. Diffbot helped eBay reduce 30% of its manual work which lowered expenses and saved time. As a former Diffbot customer, I was fortunate to have been able to develop a great connection with the CEO, Mike and the rest of the team.

I am proud to be one of the first customers to join the Diffbot team. One of my main responsibilities at Diffbot is to build tools that enable non-technical users to understand our technology. I will be working on some very exciting projects so stay tuned!

In my free time, you can find me playing poker (online and offline), playing volleyball on the beach, watching European soccer, hanging out with friends and traveling (17 countries and counting!).  

I look forward to my new adventures and challenges at Diffbot!

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Diffy

Welcome Priya Venkateshan – Senior Software Engineer

Hi, my name is Priya, and I’m a Senior Software Engineer at Diffbot.

I grew up in Bangalore, India, and since everyone around me was getting into programming, I did too; though I secretly wanted to be in medicine or journalism. However, thanks to the professors and peers at NITK Surathkal, I discovered machine learning, got really into it, and was soon trying to learn information retrieval concepts from grainy MIT OpenCourseWare videos. Soon after, I enrolled in UC Irvine’s master’s program in Computer Science and enjoyed the wide variety of cutting-edge courses in machine learning concepts. During my time there, I worked on a thesis involving graphical models for coreference resolution.

My experience in the industry, especially on eCommerce data, has taught me about the importance of domain knowledge and scale in making machine learning models useful in a real-world context, as well as given me an interest in best practices regarding supporting data and models in production. Prior to Diffbot, I worked at eBay, where we crawled product websites to augment the eBay catalog. Diffbot was one of the tools our organization used towards this goal. Having worked on web crawling and data extraction in a specific domain, it is exciting to work on the generalized version of those problems at Diffbot, especially since I get to impact a state-of-the-art, commercial knowledge graph and work with some of the best minds focused on these problems.

I write and edit fiction in my spare time, where I use technology to make life easier for fiction writers.

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Diffy