Before founding Ontela, Charles spent seven years as a developer at Expedia, the premier travel web site. As part of the flight search engine team, Charles contributed to the core server technology supplying real-time, high-availability flight pricings and routings. Later, as a member of the customer analytics team, Charles lead a development team which designed and implemented several systems for real time testing, forecasting and other large-scale, complex numerical tasks. Charles graduated from UCLA in 1992 with a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering. Charles began his programming career at an early age (eight years old), when he parlayed his love for his favorite game, Mad Libs, into a computerized model that made the pen-and-paper version obsolete. Charles single handedly keeps several local coffee shops in business with his latte orders, and somehow makes time for the occasional video game in between marathon coding sessions.
