Raffi Krikorian is currently the host of the "Technically Optimistic" podcast and CTO of the Emerson Collective. Formerly, he was the CTO for the Democratic party working on building tools and infrastructure to help amplify the progressive message throughout the United States. He also used to be the director in charge and the software lead at Uber's Advanced Technologies Center. He built a team from 30 academics to over 600 engineers spanning hardware, software, and operations. On September 14, 2016, his team launched the first fleet of passenger carrying, self-driving, and autonomous Ubers into Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Until August 2014, Krikorian was Twitter's VP of Engineering in charge of the Platform, the core infrastructure of Twitter. He managed 500 people who worked on, amongst other things, the business logic, the scalable services, APIs, storage, core libraries, and the internal development model of all of Twitter.
Before Twitter, Krikorian used to create technologies to help people frame their personal energy consumption against global energy production (Wattzon - Business Week's "Best Idea" 2008), fueled his television habit through writing "TiVo Hacks" (O'Reilly, August 2003), and also ran a consulting company building off-the-wall projects. At one point, he also used to teach at NYU’s ITP (created the class Every Bit You Make) and spent way too much time as a student at MIT and the MIT Media Lab (Internet 0 - Scientific American September 2004).
