About Us

YouNoodle helps people and groups that are interested in startups and innovation do what they do better. We provide business competition, event, networking and mailing list functionality for real-world groups that support startup communities. For investors, we're building technology to help inform their decisions.

YouNoodle.com is a place to discover and get involved with the hottest startups and university innovation that's happening right now. Start exploring here or check out the news feed on our home page.

YouNoodle is based in San Francisco, California.

Everyone in our team of five people is passionate about helping startups. We have each started companies before, came from five different countries to work together, and three of us were admitted into the U.S. as individuals of extraordinary ability (O-1 visa). We are growing the team so if you are the best in the world at what you do, and are excited by what we're building, get in touch.

• Bob Goodson, CEO, Cofounder - British

  Bob was studying for the MPhil Medieval English Literature at Oxford before being head-hunted to the U.S. by Max Levchin. He was one of the first employees at Yelp.com before starting YouNoodle. Chinese acrobatics is the latest pursuit.

• Kirill Makharinsky, Business Development and Data Analytics, Cofounder - Russian, British

  Real World Magazine's 'UK Graduate of the Year 2006', Kirill finished Oxford with a Mathematics degree and then worked on data and analytics at Slide.com before starting YouNoodle. He's seriously into tennis, heli-skiing, piano and making sense of huge data sets.

• Rebeca Hwang, Network Strategy and Development - Korean, Argentinean

  Rebeca is a Chemistry and Physics Olympiad Medalist of Argentina, has 3 patents, donated to NGOs, and had a full Scholarship to MIT. She is a PhD candidate at Stanford on Social Network Theory, and is into rugby and white water rafting.

• Joachim Krebs, Engineer - Danish

  Joachim was recruited by legendary game-developer Sir Peter Molyneux at 16.

• Sam Purtill, Engineer - American

  Sam is a young entrepreneur and web engineer. Deferred university place to join YN. At 16, became a partner in the Romanian-based design studio, Okapi Studio (http://okapistudio.com).

The people backing us are just as passionate about startups as we are. They have started and invested in some of the most successful technology companies today (PayPal, Facebook, Napster, Yelp, Slide, Geni and many others). Our investors include Peter Thiel, The Founders Fund, Max Levchin, and our advisors include Russel Simmons.

Press inquiries: Susan MacTavish Best - susan@bestpr.net