Steve Souders works at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!. Prior to that he ran the development team for My Yahoo!. He's been at Yahoo! since 2000 working on many of the platforms and products within the company. His work tackling the scalability challenges of Yahoo!'s large number of users and page views groomed him for his current role. As Chief Performance Yahoo! he has developed a set of best practices for making web sites faster. He builds tools for performance analysis and evangelizes these best practices and tools across Yahoo!'s product teams. He's currently writing a book entitled High Performance Web Sites, to be published by O'Reilly in Summer '07. Prior to Yahoo! Steve worked at several small to mid-sized startups including two companies he co-founded, Helix Systems and CoolSync. He also worked at General Magic, Whowhere? and Lycos. In the early 80's Steve caught the Artificial Intelligence bug and worked at a few companies doing research on Machine Learning including several publications and conference appearances. He received a BS in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia and a MS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. Steve's interests are varied. He sits on the board of Freehand Systems and Fremont Hills Country Club. He teaches Sunday School at First Lutheran Church in Palo Alto. He's played basketball with several NBA players, but has recently retired and switched to Ultimate Frisbee. He was a member of the Universal Studios Internet Task Force. He participated in setting a Guinness world record. He has rebuilt a 90-year-old carriage house. He has a wonderful wife and three daughters.
