About Us

The Picnik team is headquartered in downtown Seattle. We love making great software for real people, eating the food at Pike Place Market, and taking pictures that bring to life great memories of times we've had with family and friends.

Interested in joining the team, partnering with us, or just want to tell us what you think about Picnik?

Looking for Press info? Visit press.picnik.com.

Jonathan Sposato / CEO

Our serial entrepreneur, Jonathan joined the Picnik team after selling his company Phatbits to Google. Phatbits went on to be Google Gadgets, the cornerstone of the internet giant's desktop applications strategy, which continues to reach millions of people every day. Prior to Phatbits, Jonathan was a senior manager in Microsoft's consumer division, personally delivering the next level of thought on key Microsoft properties to chairman Bill Gates and the company's leadership, as well as driving the development of award-winning software applications, video games, and social communications applications. When he's not at work, Jonathan can usually be found sitting at the bar he owns in downtown Seattle talking to complete strangers about Picnik and "Web two-point-oh."

Darrin Massena / Picnik Co-Founder, CTO

Darrin has been avidly developing software for the last 25 years. Prior to Picnik, Darrin was a co-founder of Spiffcode, and the co-author of ground breaking real-time strategy game Warfare Incorporated, which was named "Handheld Game of the Year" by Palm Computing in 2003. Darrin was a founding member of the Palm Open Source community and brought the first Windows development tools to the platform. He previously was a development manager at Microsoft, where he was a "Leonardo DaVinci Award" winner, and where he and Mike took turns managing each other. Darrin is also a collector... of dusty handhelds his wife refers to as "the PDA museum." Original Apple Newton? Check. Sharp Zaurus? Check. Extremely rare Sony Magic Link? Believe it.

Mike Harrington / Picnik Co-Founder, COO

Prior to Picnik, Mike co-founded Valve Software where he was the director of development for Half-Life, an industry phenomenon that sold more than 10 million copies and won more than 50 "Game of the Year" awards. PC Gamer magazine, the best selling PC games publication, has repeatedly named Half-Life "the best PC game of all time." Prior to Valve, Mike worked as a development manager for the Microsoft consumer division, Microsoft Windows NT User Interface team and the OS/2 graphics engine team. Mike loves getting into the outdoors, and recently bought a mountain bike that seems to be beating him up.

Peter Roman / Lead Designer

Peter was the only kid in the fourth grade with a business card. Self-made to match his website, Peter had already embraced the holistic method he continues to bring to his work. From his award-winning freelance work to his work as lead designer on a number of Real Networks properties and to his current vocation running brand, design and UI for Picnik, Peter has tirelessly worked towards achieving a gestalt experience across his projects. A dedicated neophile, he brings to his work an ability to embrace and normalize all the latest technologies that surround our everyday lives, facilitating a seamless adoption of those technologies by his audience. In his spare time, Peter enjoys mining the internets for new additions to his LOLcat collection, debating with himself why that pixel really should be moved 3 pixels to the left, and using the word "gestalt."

Brian Terry / Quixotic Softographer

Polyglot, international adventurer and internet developer extraordinaire, Brian comes to Picnik with more than 10 years of experience in building great websites. After earning his computer science degree at Stanford, he spent five years at Homestead.com, one year in Norway (fjords!), and five years at Expedia. At the advanced age of 10 years old, Brian won his first computer in a programming contest from Apple. Nowadays, outside of work, he enjoys taking pictures of (read: chasing after) his 3-year-old son, climbing mountains, and dodging traffic on his bicycle.

Justin Huff / Penguin Handler

Small company veteran Justin graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in computer engineering and has played key roles in startups ranging from imaging SONAR at BlueView Technologies, home automation at 1Control/Pluto, and non-relational databases at Applied Technical Systems. Since moving into the corner window desk at Picnik World HQ, he's been busy with many tasks, most having to do with Linux, and finds that his adventurous resume has proved useful when building, scaling, and dumping water on Picnik's ever-expanding infrastructure. When not at work, you'll usually find him out on a run, strapped to a scuba tank, attempting some new feat of home improvement, or being urged into a triathlon by fellow Picniker Mike. His plans for 2009 include hitting the lecture circuit and figuring out a way to incorporate SONAR technology into Picnik's virtualized data center.

Steve Leroux / Software Engineer, Importer of Fine Teas

Representing our Northern Neighbors and bringing a diverse background to Picnik, Steve has experience in developing multimedia frameworks (Microsoft), mobile messaging applications (Vazu), and next-generation web services (Feedwhip). Steve received his BS from the University of British Columbia where he assisted research into issues of gender and educational software. Steve enjoys soccer, gardening, and encouraging his two-year-old daughter to stomp on things. Steve's favorite tea is a second-flush SFTGFOP organic darjeeling from the Makaibari estate.

Charlie Whiton / QA Manager, Community Relations Guy

Charlie worked for Microsoft and then Expedia for 14 years in some capacity as a Tester then QA Management, peaking in a killer assignment to Beijing where he sharpened the product development team for Expedia's China subsidiary. His enthusiasm for photography dates back to his high school days messing around with an entry-level 35 mm camera and was cemented when, drawing on his newfound darkroom abilities and a great deal of luck, he won a local photo competition. Soon he was blowing his cash on motor-drives and other high-powered gear just like the professional d00dz, or at least as far as his allowance would go. These days, Charlie likes trudging out into the backcountry somewhere and (while perhaps developing and utilizing best practices) trying to find his way back.

Ali Fisher / Community Cultivator, QA Deputy

Born and raised in the City to the East: Bellevue, Wa, Ali's wanderlust first took her to Hamilton College in exotic upstate New York, where she earned her BA in English, then to South Africa, Ireland, England, Nepal, Cambodia and most recently Peru. Her work experience so far includes working as an actress on a murder mystery dinner train and working on a wildlife preserve in South Africa, both experiences giving her valuable skills she brings to her current work answering our users' feedback.

K Michael Alexander / Designer

A recent transplant to these moister climes from sunny Spokane, Michael recently worked as a senior UX/UI designer on digital casino games. Before that, he was racking up thousands of logo and branding design projects, in addition to web design, print media design, and assorted freelance work. His UI/UX experience dates back to making interactive paper games for his friends in grade school, but fearing a life of penury failed to pursue this as a profession until a university professor convinced him to take a commercial art and design course. Outside of the appurtenances of his profession, he enjoys science fiction, video games, and pirates. He would also like to point out that he was for pirates before pirates were cool.

Brenda Anderson / Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations

Brenda joined Team Picnik remotely to manage the Picnik Antipodean Branch Offices, located in Masterton, a bustling country town just a mountain range away from the capital city of Wellington, New Zealand. Originally of a more domestically American persuasion, Brenda took her BS in Biological Bases of Behaviour and promptly took a job in the financial business. After a few years working, and traveling, as a consultant, she decided to give in to the seductive buzzings of the travel bug, and next thing you know, she's finds herself in a medieval German town being swept up in a fairy tale romance and relocating permanently to New Zealand where she now lives with her husband and three children.

Sonia Ramos / Picnik Community Therapist, Delegada de los Hispanohablantes

Sonia comes to us from the University of Washington Spanish Studies department, where she'll earn her BA at the end of this year and where she presides over the University's Delta Zeta sorority. Originally from Renton, Washington (just a little south of here), Sonia has family in Ecuador, and has travelled there and in Peru where she volunteered with an after-school program for disadvantaged children, and onwards to see Machu Picchu. An accomplished swing and salsa dancer, Sonia plans on putting her language skills in towards a career in either healthcare, education, technology, or healthcare education technology, and enjoys vacationing anywhere out of doors generally, but specifically somewhere with a beach, in the sun, and completely dissimilar to Seattle.

Sarah Stackhouse / Office Wrangler

A native of the incomparably named town of Rough and Ready, California, Sarah brings to the Web 2.0 world her experiences gleaned from a life with goats, horses, and donkeys. On a special mission here in Washington to find Mexican food to rival that of the Nevada City Mexican restaurant her family owned for 30 years, she also keeps a database running in her head of where the nearest bowl of pho can be found at any given location. With a degree in Psychology and Art from Evergreen College in Olympia, her hobbies include painting and photography, and she boasts the highly marketable skill of being able to change paper and/or ink in anything.

Lisa Conquergood / CMO, Bullhorn

Lisa recently joined the Picnik team and instantly won the award for most medieval name in the office. A 4th generation Northwest native, her favorite getaway spot is an old cabin on the cold and grey Washington coast, and outside of her husband and two sons, she likes to devote time to finding the perfect pair of high heels that DO work on Seattle's damp, steep sidewalks. With an MBA from Seattle University, retail-veteran Lisa has built her career around fashion merchandising, social networking and e-commerce, and an internship at the Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Station. After helping turn eddiebauer.com into an award-winning e-commerce site, then honing her expertise of unearthing amazing travel deals at Expedia, she got her start-up cred at Bevy before coming to Picnik to help bring photo-editing beauty to the masses and influence her engineering coworkers to wear something other than jeans and tshirts.

Chelsea Fisher / Picnik Community Therapist

Chelsea is Team Picnik's first professional photographer! Originally from Helena, Montana, she was majoring in Communications and Public Relations when she was forced into a photography class to fulfill a credit for her Journalism emphasis. Falling in love with the medium, it whisked her away to Seattle to study photography at the Art Institute of Seattle where she met her husband, with whom she has a one-year-old named Jude. In addition to her own photography business, she's worked for American Greetings at Photoworks, is currently Cupcake Royale's product photographer (cupcakes!), and of course works here at Picnik, answering feedback and providing support to our community of Picnikers.