| Website | linkedin.com/in/g... |
| @gerster | |
| Birthdate | 1970 |
| Harvard University, AB | 1992 |
| English | |
| UC Berkeley, MBA | 1992 |
David Gerster is a Silicon Valley manager, entrepreneur and angel investor. His work at large companies has focused primarily on analytics and search relevance.
Mr. Gerster arrived in Silicon Valley in 1998 to attend the Haas School of Business. During his second year he received a Price Fellowship in Entrepreneurship and reached the semifinals of the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition. His team dropped out of the competition after receiving funding from the VC who judged their submission, and he spent most of his last semester setting up the new company, christened DeltaClick. DeltaClick was unable to raise a Series B, and closed its doors in June 2001 after one year in business.
After DeltaClick, he worked as a securitization consultant before joining Yahoo in April 2003. At Yahoo, he managed various analytics teams and led “Project Magellan”, an initiative to collect URL data from Yahoo Toolbar and feed this data into the search ranking function. Magellan launched at the end of 2007, and the first web-wide clickstream improvements to search ranking launched at the end of 2008. (Yahoo later shut down its search engine as part of their July 2009 agreement with Microsoft.)
He left Yahoo in February 2009 and consulted briefly at Hadoop startup Cloudera before joining Microsoft’s social search team in May 2009. He is an expert on Dryad and Cosmos (Microsoft’s analog of Hadoop) and works closely with the social search relevance team to provide data for their experiments. He also does machine learning work, including a project to train a classifier to identify uninteresting Twitter content.
He is a seed investor in mob.ly, a mobile development shop acquired by Groupon in May 2010.
| Company | Date | Round | Size | Participants |
| Mob.ly | 3/08 | Seed | $1.1M | 8 |
