GoodTree team

Oliver graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz in June 2006 with a Computer Science degree. He loves building GoodTree, and gets giddy every time his mom tells him she used it to look something up. Oliver grew up in a family of political thinkers in Washington, D.C., immersed in an environment of social involvement. He credits his caring, supportive family with his ability to think independently and consider the greater good.

James has 4 kids, a 2002 Toyota Prius, and a bunch of ideas for great things to do with the Web. After selling the websites Tickle, Ringo and LoveHappens to Monster in 2004, he started a start up-greenhouse in San Francisco called Ooga Labs. Other Ooga projects relate to health, family, education, and local community, all seeking to build excellent Web products, around sustainable businesses that make a positive difference in the world. His first involvement in building online communities came in 1991 with a social network developed inside GTE New Ventures for people making movies in Hollywood called TalentScout. James founded other websites including Venture Capital News Network in 1995, Tickle in 1999, LoveHappens in 2002, and Ringo in 2005.

Suzanne Eloise Siskel is the Director of Community and Resource Development at the Ford Foundation in New York . She oversees Ford's support for programs that address poverty and injustice through grant making in the fields of community development, sexuality and reproductive health and environment and development in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Russia and the United States. Previous positions with the Ford Foundation were as Representative for Indonesia in Jakarta and Representative for the Philippines in Manila. Her grant making in Southeast Asia included work on the development and expansion of indigenous and social justice philanthropy; strengthening civil society; promoting economic and social development and community-based natural resources policy and management; and building local capacity for socio-economic research and analysis. She also managed support for higher education and scholarship programs aimed at promoting local leadership and community empowerment among poor and marginalized segments of the Indonesian population; as well as work on community-based reconciliation processes in the post-Suharto era.

Trained as a social anthropologist at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, Suzanne has taught at Brawijaya and Airlangga universities in East Java, Indonesia and in the US at Johns Hopkins and George Washington. Her research experience includes extensive fieldwork in Muslim boarding schools in Madura, Indonesia; rural communities in Pernambuco, northeast Brazil; and among the Tzotzil Maya of highland Chiapas, Mexico. Suzanne first worked in Indonesia in 1974 as a Luce Scholar of the Henry Luce Foundation and later as a Fulbright scholar.

In the 1980s she was a social sciences consultant to USAID, the World Bank and the Government of Indonesia, based in west Timor. Suzanne currently serves as Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Fulbright Association.

Carl J. Schramm is president and chief executive officer of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Trained both as an economist and lawyer, Schramm began his career on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University and emerged as a respected thinker in health care finance, regulation, and insurance. He founded the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Care Finance and Management in 1980, the first such research center in the nation. While at Hopkins, he led the country's only post-doctoral training program in health finance, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In 1987, he chaired the American Assembly on Health Care Costs and edited its volume, Health Care and Its Costs.

Schramm left the university to head the Health Insurance Association of America where many industry-wide innovations in health insurance were developed. He later became executive vice president of Fortis (now Assurant) and president of its health insurance operations. He developed several innovations at Fortis including transition coverage for recent college graduates. He has served as a board member of other U.S. and foreign insurance and reinsurance companies.

An active entrepreneur, Schramm was a cofounder of HCIA, Inc. and Patient Choice Health Care. He founded Greenspring Advisors, a consulting and merchant banking firm in the health information and risk management industries. Among the firm's clients were insurance and reinsurance companies including Blue Cross plans, industrial firms such as Ford and Johnson & Johnson, and venture capital funds.

Besides many leading academic journals, Schramm's work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal and the New England Journal of Medicine. He is the author of The Entrepreneurial Imperative (Harper Collins, Oct. 2006) and his next book, Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism (Yale 2007), with Will Baumol and Robert Litan will be out published in the spring of 2007. He is a contributing editor of Inc. magazine.

In addition to his graduate fellowships (New York State Regents and Ford Foundation), Schramm received two consecutive NIH Career Science Awards and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow at the National Academy of Science, Institute of Medicine. He is a Batten Fellow at the Darden School of the University of Virginia, a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of Royal Society of Arts. He received the George Eastman Medal from the University of Rochester in 2005. In 2006, he was appointed to the Department of Commerce's Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economy Advisory Committee and was selected by Secretary Carlos Gutierrez to chair the committee.

About the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation: The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City is a private, nonpartisan foundation that works with partners to advance entrepreneurship in America and improve the education of children and youth. The Kauffman Foundation was established in the mid-1960s by the late entrepreneur and philanthropist Ewing Marion Kauffman. Information about the Kauffman Foundation is available at www.kauffman.org.

Toni Schneider is CEO of Automattic, the makers of the WordPress.com blogging service and the Akismet anti comment spam service, and is a venture partner at VC firm True Ventures. Prior to his current roles, Schneider was a VP at Yahoo! where he ran the Yahoo! Developer Network, a new initiative to turn Yahoo! into an open web services platform for third party software developers. He joined Yahoo! through their acquisition of Oddpost where he was CEO. Prior to Oddpost he held technical and marketing roles at several Silicon Valley startups. Schneider studied Computer Science at Stanford.

Chris currently serves as the CEO of Affinity Labs, a start up focused on building worldwide online communities, backed by the Mayfield Fund and Trinity Ventures. Prior to Affinity, he founded and served as CEO of Military.com, a website that connects over 10 million military personnel and their families, helping them with education, careers, and financial matters. Prior to Military.com, Chris served as a Naval Flight Officer in the US Navy in support of maritime interdiction operations in the Red Sea, NATO enforcement operations in the Adriatic, and counter-narcotics missions in Central America.

Chris is a frequent speaker and a regular guest on CNN and other national radio and TV programs. He has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Business Week, Financial Times, and others. Chris graduated with High Distinction from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was named a Distinguished Naval Graduate. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute.