team
Reece Pacheco Founder, CEO
i’m reece and i consider myself a starter, a traveler and an athlete. i’m also known for wearing a lot of brightly colored plaid.
i’m not going to pretend that i’m big-time enough to have someone else write my bio. i also don’t like capital letters. i do love startups and i’m currently the founding CEO of my second company, Shelby.tv.
before this i started TeamHomeField.com with my friends Dan and Joe. before that i played pro lacrosse (yes, it exists) and before that, i worked in Hollywood. before that i traveled around the world.
and where did it all start? Falmouth, MA, a quiet tourist town on Cape Cod, where my family owned and operated a couple restaurants (through which i learned a lot about hard work) and where i spent every day by the sea.
overall, anything but prototypical, probably goofier than you’d expect, non-technical cofounder guy who ‘hustles’ and ‘crushes’ things or something like that, and is lucky to work and be friends with a lot of really smart people.
Dan Spinosa Founder, CTO
When I think about Shelby I see her as what she will become, and I feel incredibly proud and fortunate to lead the team that will make that happen. There’s no way I could do it by myself, and there’s no way this team could do it alone either. We are standing on the shoulders of giants, stealing from great artists, and abusing clichés.
I love hacking, love working on cars and building with my hands, like writing (danspinosa.com) but am not a big fan of writing my own bio. Still, I’m doing it. For you, apparently…
I grew up on Strong Island, met Reece at Brown (B.S. in CE ‘05) where we played lacrosse together, worked at Cisco for some time then started HomeField with Reece and my best-friend-since-7 Joe Yevoli. That was early 2008 and we bootstrapped the shit out of HomeField for a few years. During that time I learned everything I could about web app development, business and the loneliness of working form home semi-permanently. Now Joe has taken over on HomeField while Reece and I venture off to build Shelby into something huge. It’s incredible how much there always is to learn, do and create. I don’t think I’ll ever get enough of this.
Steve Jobs was a huge idol of mine. I would’ve loved to have met him, but I’d also love to meet you and hear about the stuff you’re building. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
Henry Sztul
Well hello, my name is Henry and I like to do coding. I am a rower turned physicist turned hacker who loves the outdoors, my family, and Shelbz.
I see Shelby as the ultimate vehicle to discover and enjoy video from any source on the web on any device imaginable. That’s the vision I want to see through.
“Learn something new every day” -Henry
It is so exciting to build a product from the ground up with a great group of talented people whom I have been fortunate to stumble upon a little over a year ago.
“Always live on the edge of comfortablity” -Henry
A native New Yorker, I got my BA from Colgate and PhD from The City College of New York, where I led a team focused on discovering new properties of beams of light that twist and turn as they travel through space.
“42” -Henry
:i_like => {:the_code, :physics, :triathlons, :building_web_applications => [like TweJay - an app that makes Twitter talk], :being_a_dad}
Myles Recny
Greetings, human. I’m a cyborg from the future on an top-secret mission to change the world. Luckily I am able to devote roughly 5% of my computational resources to building the Shelby platform. My models are beginning to suggest that this platform may change the world more profoundly than my original mission. This is a d1l3mm4.
I’ve lived in the UK, Australia, China and the US. I speak Australian, Chinese and Binary. I don’t know what to call home. I love hacking and philosophizing about science and reality. Yes, I am a wanker.
I joined Shelby during the TechStars program, at which I was working as a ‘hackstar’. At Shelby I’ve hacked on every level of our stack but primarily have been writing invisible back-end processes. I love open-source hacking and going forward, will be turning Shelby into a dominant force in the OS community.
If you’re in the NYC I’d love to hear from you. I’m good for a beer and a laugh.
Chris Kurdziel
Oh hi, I didn’t see you there. I’m Chris. I’m sometimes (affectionately) known around these parts as intern zero, or i[0] for short. Every kingdom needs a court jester, and it just so happens that this one knows how to build a DCF. I’m a CS-nerd-turned-b-school student who handles a little bit of operations, marketing, business development, and a host of other seemingly important sounding job duties as Shelby’s summer intern.
When I’m not voraciously reading about tech and startups, following up on the latest video memes or working on my Shelby related duties, I moonlight as a VC, make my guitar go all “widdly-widdly”-like and spend a lot of time outdoors running, hiking, climbing, and hiding in bushes waiting for unsuspecting strangers. I also have been known to enjoy a game or two of Starcraft 2.
I’m incredibly fortunate to be exploring the cutting edge of web video with the talented Team Shelbz and I am hungry to help them build a media company of the future. Like my cyborg pal Myles, I’m generally good for a laugh and a beer, so shoot me a tweet if you want to meet up.
Mark Johnson
my story starts in a log cabin in the woods on a Christmas tree farm in rural North Carolina… and somehow ends with me being a programmer for the-coolest-social-video-startup-ever (crowd erupts into applause).
in between, i attended and graduated from Brown (S.c.B. in CE in ‘05), which is where i met Dan and Reece. Dan and i were basically work wives back in college, and for a time i was also sort of his boss when we were both teaching assistants (which i try to remind him of whenever possible).
between Brown and Shelby, i ended up in California where i spent 6-7 years working for VMware. i started out as a low-level kernel hacker for ESX and moved my way up through the software stack to work on improving VirtualCenter’s architecture. i also spent a ton of time improving testing and performance of both products.
but, when i heard that the Homefield team had made it into TechStars and were building Shelby, it was too cool to resist. so i jumped ship from VMware and haven’t looked back (except when old work friends tweet VMware video links).
when i’m not coding, i’m playing guitar or swing-dancing with the wifey.
gimme a tweet if you have a feature request or want to talk about C or inline assembly for old times’ sake.
Lauren Appelwick
Meet Lauren a.k.a. “laurenwick” a.k.a. 1996 All-School Hula Hoop Champion. Lauren is the Brand Director at Shelby.tv, mostly because she wanted the title of Social Hacker, but we told her that wasn’t a real thing.
Prior to her life at Shelby, Lauren wrote a novel (no she didn’t), studied economic theory (ha, could you imagine?), and worked as a theater technician and carpenter (actually, that last part’s true). She also spent a number of years as a publicist, blog editor, and social media producer.
Lauren brings to Team Shelby a number of valuable skills, including an undying commitment to learning how to dougie. She is from Seattle by way of Minnesota, and sometimes her accent comes out and it’s—let’s just be honest—pretty entertaining. Furthermore, Lauren just realized that everyone else wrote their bios in first-person and now feels pretty awkward about that.
