General Sentiment is a partnership of New York based serial technology entrepreneurs and Stony Brook University.
The team's prior entrepreneurial success stories include Fatwire, Karma411, Indavest, Vyoma Media, and GKVale. The founding team consists of Mark Fasciano, Greg Artzt, John Murcott, and Professor Steve Skiena, the original architect of Stony Brook's Textmap technology.
Mark Fasciano, Chairman | e-mail: mark.fasciano [at] generalsentiment.com
Mark Fasciano is the Co-founder and Chairman of General Sentiment. Mark has 12 years of technology startup experience and is a serial entrepreneur. In 2007, Mark launched Karma411 with fellow FatWire co-founder John Murcott. Karma411 is the leading people-to-people fundraising and collaboration tool for nonprofits.
Prior to these companies Mark co-founded FatWire Software in 1996. For ten years as CEO, Mark helped grow the company to become a leading Web Content Management software provider, doing over $40M in sales with over 400 customers in nine countries around the world including GM, Ford, Channel, JPMorgan Chase, Best Buy, Banco Santander, Allied Irish Bank, and Walmart.
Mark graduated from Cornell University with degrees in English and Computer Science, and received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago. His doctoral thesis from the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Chicago defined a system for planning and acting in real-time, uncertain worlds.
Steve Skiena, Chief Science Officer | e-mail: steve.skiena [at] generalsentiment.com
Steven Skiena is the Co-founder and Chief Science Officer of General Sentiment. Steve is a professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University. The Lydia news/blog analysis project created by him and his students serves as the technological foundation for General Sentiment.
His research interests include the design of graph, string, and geometric algorithms, and their applications. He is the author of four books, including "The Algorithm Design Manual" and "Calculated Bets: Computers, Gambling, and Mathematical Modeling to Win".
He is the recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award and the IEEE Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award.
Gregory Artzt, Chief Executive Officer | e-mail: greg.artzt [at] generalsentiment.com
Greg Artzt is the Co-founder and CEO of General Sentiment. Greg has 10 years of varied experience as an entrepreneur in technology and financial markets. After graduating from Cornell University as a Computer Science major, and a brief stint as an ITF tour professional tennis player, Greg started his technology career at Computer Associates as a software engineer.
Greg later joined Citigroup as an associate in Fixed-income structured products, quantitative analysis, options market making, and proprietary trading.
His first entrepreneurial venture was as one of the founding members of hedge fund Element Capital where he acted as a trader, systems developer, quantitative analyst, and portfolio manager.
In late 2006, he co-founded Indavest, an angel-funded technology incubation and investment firm in the US and India. At Indavest, Greg was involved in building and nurturing several technology start-ups from the ground level into their current growth stage of development. Greg joined up with the rest of the General Sentiment team in mid-2008 to launch his most exciting entrepreneurial technology venture yet.
Read a letter from Greg explaining his vision for General Sentiment.
John Murcott, VP Products & Strategy | e-mail: john.murcott [at] generalsentiment.com
John Murcott is the Co-founder and VP of Products & Strategy for General Sentiment. John has 15 years of technology startup experience in Products, Strategy, and Marketing. In 2007, John started Karma411, a social networking site that raises money for nonprofits, with his business partner Mark Fasciano, another Cofounder of General Sentiment. He is responsible for product development and runs the engineering and QA efforts on the site. He works with non-profits to get them started in the Web 2.0 world and reach out to their first supporters. He is also responsible for Marketing and Public Relations.
Previously, John cofounded FatWire Software, a Web Content Management company in 1996 with business partners Mark Fasciano and Ari Kahn. He began by creating FatWire Professional Services, which was responsible for 100% revenue growth for three years and provided most of the original funding for the company before the first round of capital was raised.
John later managed the FatWire Products Group and Engineering Team and was responsible for product strategy and direction. He grew an offshore Engineering team in Hyderabad, India to support development and QA processes for the Product. He became an expert on Persuasive Content Centric Applications and has spoken many times on personalization strategies and targeted marketing best practices
Before joining FatWire, John worked for Andersen Consulting, where he managed development teams that connected consumer services to large commercial databases for telecommunications clients. John received his MBA from the University of Maryland with a concentration in Information Technology and Operations Management.
