About the Company

Relationships are about people, not contacts, messages or updates.

Mingly was founded to help people stay better connected with an easy-to-use, lightweight relationship management tool.

* * *

In 2009, Mingly Founder and CEO Tyler Koblasa was looking for advisors, partners, and supporters for a new venture he was pursuing. He met amazing, inspiring people, and felt a huge loss when he couldn’t build ongoing relationships with everyone efficiently.

Traditional CRM tools and desktop software didn’t quite cut it, as they were heavy and opportunity or sales lead focused. A new form of “Personal Relationship Manager” or “PRM” was needed.

After searching for ways to better manage a growing network of personal contacts, Tyler founded Mingly to create a lightweight relationship management tool that helps people stay connected. Mingly launched in 2010 after winning a recent Startup Weekend L.A., and is now based in SoMa in San Francisco.

Mingly’s Core Values:

• Trust: the privacy and security of your data is Mingly’s top priority. We will never look at or share your personal information, and are committed to taking all precautionary steps to insure the highest level of security and privacy.
• User experience: Mingly aims to be the simplest, most user-friendly contact management product available, while providing a powerful set of features to help users stay connected with their key contacts.
• Community: Our users offer invaluable feedback that helps Mingly become better for everyone. We love to engage with our users to create the best experience possible.

Our Team

Tyler Koblasa

Founder and CEO
@tylerkoblasa

Tyler has over 15 years of experience as an entrepreneur and engineer. During high school he started his first business, a free hosting network that has powered over 100,000 websites, including LeonardoDiCaprio.com, a #1 Free-to-Play Online Game on Download.com, and others. Tyler later created StoreAndServe.com, a former top-700 site (Alexa). Tyler also spent time at AOL Advertising, where he developed and supported a revenue ad network optimization engine. After winning Startup Weekend LA, Tyler joined Startup Weekend to help organize events. He launched the popular LA tech event Startup Nights to foster tech entrepreneurship in the LA area.

Vasily Myazin

Lead UX, Interface Design and Developer
@vasily_m

Lead user experience advocate, interface designer and developer at Mingly, Vasily is addicted to user feedback and constant iterations. Having previously worked as a lead UI developer at Sony Network Entertainment and designed and developed websites for many years, Vasily has a keen eye for refined user interface on both desktop and mobile platforms. He lives and breathes CSS, HTML5, iOS, JavaScript and usability testing. In his free time, Vasily tinkers around with music software and synthesizers.

Dana Byerlee

Business Development & Marketing Manager
@LADLynn

Dana’s unique blend of a management consulting background, combined with her expertise in marketing and analytics, makes her a valued strategist.
Dana began her career in Manhattan, working for industry leaders such as Milliman, Goldman Sachs, and The Nielsen Company. She has led massive data projects at some of the largest healthcare providers, and provided extensive competitive guidance and forecasting for some of P&G’s largest brands, and beverage companies like Pepsi and Nestlé. As a consultant at Ferrazzi Greenlight, Dana created relational marketing and communication strategies for F500 firms such as Accenture and Apollo Group.

Dana attended Tufts University where she graduated cum laude with B.A.s in both Quantitative Economics and Political Science.

Manuel Gomez

Lead Back-end Developer and Architect

Advisors

Allen Morgan

@allenmorgan

Investor and advisor to Mingly. Venture Partner at Mayfield Fund. Allen’s principal focus is on start-ups in the area of consumer internet services, interactive entertainment, online advertising and new media. Prior to joining Mayfield, Allen was a partner with two renowned Silicon Valley law firms, Latham & Watkins and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. In his career, he has closed more than 750 venture capital financings, mergers and acquisitions, IPOs and other public offerings. Allen earned an undergraduate degree (summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) from Dartmouth College, a second bachelor’s degree and master’s degree from Oxford University and a J.D. from the University of Virginia.

Julie Hanna

@juleshanna

Julie believes entrepreneurs are the world’s greatest change agents. Her work as a board member, startup advisor and angel investor is informed by an aptitude for market timing, as well as hands-on experience creating industry-defining business models and products adopted by tens of millions of people. Julie is chair of the board at Kiva, a board member at Socialtext, and an advisor to Idealab and a number of startups and social impact businesses. She helped build several successful consumer internet and business software companies: onebox.com, (acquired by OpenWave), the fastest growing dot com era internet communications service; Portola (acquired by Netscape); Scalix (acquired by Sebring); and Healtheon, now WebMD.

Janice Fraser

@clevergirl

Janice the founder of LUXr, a design program for Lean Startups. She’s an entrepreneur, designer, and advisor to early stage companies. Janice has raised capital, founded both successful and failed startups, and consulted to both large enterprises and aspiring entrepreneurs. Along the way Janice has learned a lot about what makes some teams thrive and others fail. Prior to starting LUXr, Janice was a founding partner of Adaptive Path and served as the company’s first CEO.

Jason Hreha

@jhreha

Jason is a Product and Behavior Designer. Previously, he led product at social donation platform Rally.org. His experience in behavior design stems from working as an Applied Psychologist and researcher with Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab. In that role, he led a project to come up with the world’s first taxonomy of human behavior – complete with strategies for changing each different behavior type. This was used as the behavior-change framework for the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos. He advises Mingly and 500 Startups, and is a Mentor for the Thiel Foundation’s 20 Under 20 Program.

In December, he won grand prize at Aetna and RockHealth’s RFP interface design challenge.

David Waxman

@david_waxman

David is an Internet entrepreneur and advisor with nearly 20 years of experience. He has co-founded several companies, including Firefly Network (acquired by Microsoft), PeoplePC (acquired by Earthlink), and Spot Runner. His focus has always been the sharing of technology with the widest possible audience, using it to level the playing field, and creating active communities. David graduated from Berkeley and MIT, and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.

Alex Karelin

@akarelin

Investor and advisor to Mingly. Alex is an angel investor and startup advisor with more than fifteen years of experience, dozens of investments and five exits. Alex co-founded and was CTO at TagWorld/Social Project which was later acquired by Viacom/MTV in 2007. He also helps startups build technology teams that combine local and remote engineers to maximize access to talent while controlling costs. Alex holds a master’s degree in Mathematics from Tulskij Gosudarstvennyj University in Russia.

Josh MacAdam

@joshmacadam

Co-founder and interim CTO at Mingly, Josh has worked with Tyler on previous startup projects since 1998 and also built a company called AuctionWagon, which was later acquired by Net2Auction in San Diego. Josh serves as an active mentor at The Brandery accelerator. Earlier in his career, Josh worked at Microsoft and later led technology as CTO of QIXO, an early travel meta-search backed by Eastgate Capital. Josh holds a B.S. from University of California at Santa Barbara in Mathematics.

William Barnes

@williampbarnes

Investor and advisor to Mingly. William founded uCrave.com that grew to 2.5 million readers per month. Bought, scaled and sold e-commerce company NerdyShirts.com and holds a Mechanical Engineering degree.