Affini Management

William I. Chang, Founder and CEO

Dr. William Chang, pioneer search engineer and Internet strategist, created Infoseek's natural language, real-time distributed search engine for both the Web and enterprise applications (Ultraseek). As Vice President of Portal Strategy, Chief Technology Officer at Infoseek/GO Network, he helped to define the role of the New Media Network as the point of integration of marketing, community, and commerce. The web portal was acquired by Disney for $1.6B; the enterprise business was acquired by Inktomi for $350M, and had 2,500 corporate and institutional customers when it was later acquired by Verity in 2002.

After managing the cost-cutting efforts at Sentius Corporation while launching a new ad product called RichLink — one of the first examples of Contextual Advertising — Chang started Affini in the summer of 2001, to nurture his vision of the future internet.

A man of broad professional and personal interests, Chang was previously a computational biologist at the renowned Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, where he developed a better method for finding related proteins, and mapped the genome of an organism important to cancer research.

Chang earned an undergrad degree in mathematics from Harvard and a PhD from U.C. Berkeley for a breakthrough sublinear text matching algorithm. In his rare moments of relaxed solitude Chang likes to write music or poetry, or practice his brush calligraphy. His favorite fortune cookie reads:

Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought.

Eddie Kessler, Advisor

Eddie Kessler specializes in high-performance systems to find, manage, and distribute digital media and communications. This specialty is heavily invested in the product and feature development at Affini. Most recently the Vice President of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer of Napster, Kessler led the operation, design, and implementation of the Napster software and service, and was the Technical Expert for legal matters. Prior to Napster, Kessler was Founder and Vice President of Engineering at pioneering DVR set-top box and software developer, ReplayTV. During this time, Kessler led the development of the first hard-disk-based personal digital video recorder. As Vice President of Engineering at Infoseek, an Internet search and portal pioneer, Kessler worked with Affini founder, William Chang. Prior to Infoseek, Kessler served in various positions at notable Silicon Valley startups, including the Vice President of Software Development post at Frame Technology. He is the inventor of 5 issued patents, with 1 patent pending.

Kessler received an A.B degree from Harvard University. His degree was in Special Concentrations — The Psychology of Musical Perception — an interdisciplinary course of study in the departments of Music, Psychology and Philosophy at Harvard and MIT. Kessler continued his studies and research in a Ph.D. program in Cognitive Psychology at Stanford University, focusing on computer graphics, visual processing and music perception. Kessler's interests include music, long-distance cycling, gourmet cooking and collecting handmade textiles from around the world.