Executive Team

Michael Yang
Co-founder & Chairman of the Board
Michael Yang co-founded Verifia Inc. in 2000. He is a veteran entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in high-tech industry and has held various technical and management positions in Silicon Valley. His previous experience includes positions at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Intergraph Corp., and Samsung Electronics Company Ltd. Prior to founding Verifia, Michael was Founder, Chairman & CEO of mySimon Inc, the premier online comparison shopping service. For this venture, Michael and his team successfully raised $30M from Brentwood Venture Capital, Sprout Group, Intel Capital, and CitiCorp Venture Capital. mySimon was recognized by TIME as one of the top 20 e-Commerce services in 1999 and the company was successfully acquired by CNET for $700M in early 2000. Michael is a proven entrepreneur who is passionate about leveraging new technologies to solve real-life problems and build successful companies. He serves on the board of the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) at Stanford University, as well as several other universities and non-profit organizations. Also, Michael served as a member of the IT Advisory Council for President George W. Bush. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley, a M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and a M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

SanKu Jo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder & CTO
SanKu is an expert in Internet infrastructure and security with over 15 years of experience in telecommunications, networks and Internet technologies. Prior to co-founding Verifia, SanKu worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory as a Computer Scientist on the Next Generation Internet (NGI) and GRID projects. Previously he worked for the Korean Telecom Research Center as a member of their technical staff on ISDN applications and Internet projects. He started the first Internet-based Bulletin Board Systems (KIDS) in Korea back in 1991 and authored an Internet Guide Book in 1995. SanKu received a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, emphasizing future Internet architecture and scalable multicast video-conferencing, from Texas A&M University and B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering from KwangWoon University in Korea.

Sunny Kim
Director of Engineering
Sunny is one of the technical leaders of Verifia. Prior to joining Verifia in 2000, Sunny worked for 3 years as a technical leader for Netscape's Netcenter portal. He has built infrastructures and web systems that generated over $3M in new revenue in one quarter and automated the whole content generation of the website. Prior to Netscape, he has co-founded Netizen Communications as an Executive VP and was one of the early members in innovating the internet technology. He has been programming on the Internet since 1994 and is a well known expert in Internet Protocol, data mining, web applications, and large databases (Tera byte size). Sunny received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and a BA degree in Economics from UC Santa Cruz.

Todd Gehring
Senior Product Manager
Todd has over 11 years of software product management and development experience. He has worked extensively with Internet middleware and B2B technologies for leading Silicon Valley companies, building and bringing to market secure and scalable enterprise solutions. Prior to Verifia, Todd led software development efforts for Netfish Technologies, a B2B start-up, as their first Product Manager, defining and marketing their flagship product through the company's acquisition by IONA Technologies in 2001. Before this, Todd was a Product Manager for Oracle's Application Server product line. He also led a wide range of development projects at Netscape Communications Corporation. Todd received a B.S. in MIS from the State University of New York (College at Geneseo) and an MBA from the University of Rochester.