Mergelab was founded in the summer of 2007 following several months of exploratory meetings at Tougo Coffee. Mergelab World Headquarters is currently a cozy attic in Leschi.

We — Mark Aiken, Alan Steele and Phil Bogle — have worked together on and off for nearly 10 years. In the late 1990s, Phil and Mark first worked together at Microsoft on an experimental user-interface and systems-design project. In 2001, all three of us met up as part of Seattle startup Avogadro. Avogadro was acquired by Openwave Systems, where we shipped a mobile IM server and the V7 browser and messaging clients. And in 2005, Alan joined Phil to help run engineering at Jobster, a fast-growing employment site that Phil had co-founded the year before.

Alan Steele — our CEO — is a serial startup guy, whose first taste of success with the 1996 acquisition of Midnight Networks (he was employee #2) got him hooked forever. The addiction has taken him from writing software to writing sales proposals, from Boston to San Francisco to Seattle, and through a series of very rewarding startup experiences at eRoom Technology, Viathan Corp, Avogadro and Jobster.

At Jobster, Alan ran all technical and product operations as SVP, Products, building a team of 40+ as the company acquired over 500 enterprise customers; he also integrated the acquisitions of WorkZoo and GoJobby, building Jobster’s consumer destination to over 1 million uniques/month.

Alan lives in Seattle with his wife, Bonnie, two young boys and a very furry dog. On the weekends he is likely to be found skiing or hiking in the mountains. Alan is a graduate of M.I.T.

Mark Aiken — our Chief Architect — took longer than Alan or Phil to escape from Big Software. His boot camp years as an engineer were spent with Microsoft: first as a repeat intern during college, and later as a lead in the home networking team for Windows XP. Mark broke into the startup scene by joining Avogadro in 2001, but it took a detour through Microsoft Research in 2005 before he finally decided to strike out entirely on his own.

Mark has always been interested in low-level systems design. He has variously worked on natural-language search over structured data, Windows-kernel network drivers, a mass-scale messaging server, mobile messaging protocol design and interoperability, an embedded network protocol stack, and research into a novel safe-languages operating system and message-passing design.

Mark lives in Seattle with his beloved wife and baby daughter, and a large, lazy orange cat. Mark is originally from Montreal, and holds an engineering degree from McGill University. In the winter he sneaks away whenever possible to go snowboarding, and at all times of the year, his daughter reminds him that the world is much more interesting than a string of ordered bits.

Phil Bogle — our engineering director — was a lead developer at Microsoft from 1994-2000, working on OLE-DB, Internet Explorer, MSN Mobile, and “Redshark.” He caught the startup bug at Avogadro, leading the team that built the phone client for Avogadro’s real-time messaging platform.

After acquisition by Openwave, Phil was an architect for a next generation wireless browser incorporating scripting and offline functionality. After a stint as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Ignition, Phil co-founded Jobster. As CTO, he helped to build a top-notch engineering team and was responsible for R&D and technical strategy.

Phil lives in Bellevue with his wife, Manjari and two young daughters. You’re likely to find him every Friday rain or shine playing pickup ultimate at Interbay. Phil is a graduate of Dartmouth College and MIT.