Team

Matthew Berardo
Vice President and General Manager

Matt manages all aspects of LiveJournal, Inc., the U.S. arm of LiveJournal.com, as well as global product development. Matt comes to LJ from Yahoo!, where he was most recently Sr. Director of International Business and Product Management. In that role, Matt was responsible for managing the executive international agenda from Yahoo! corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA. Matt spent nearly 7 years in London in various positions at Yahoo! Europe, most recently as Sr. Director of Broadband and Network Services where he was responsible for the Yahoo! Frontpage, My Yahoo! and BT Yahoo!, a strategic partnership with British Telecom. Matt holds a B.A. from Dartmouth.

Ruslan Bilorusets
Director of Product Management

Ruslan oversees all U.S. product development and management of LiveJournal. He brings over 12 years of software development experience to LJ. During his 9 year tenure at BEA Systems, he was responsible for the development of WebLogic Application Server including the implementation of various J2EE containers. He has acted as a technical consultant for Fortune 500 companies including, Wells Fargo and Matson. He holds his M.S. in Computer Science from SUNY at Stony Brook. Ruslan is a certified Yoga instructor and a mountain climber.

Wally Finley
Senior Director of Operations

Wally oversees the global operation, architecture, and planning of the IT functions for LiveJournal, Inc. Wally brings more than 20 years of IT expertise to LJ. Prior to joining LiveJournal, Wally was Principal Data Center Architect at Expedia. In that capacity, Wally organized the consolidation of 30+ worldwide data centers into 3, among other accomplishments. Wally joined Expedia as part of their acquisition of Hotwire, where he was responsible for organizing and streamlining Hotwire's IT operations team. Wally has B.S. degrees in Chemistry, Math, and Computer Science from Eastern Kentucky University, and an M.S. in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University.

Stephanie Gravelle
Director of Finance & Administration

Stephanie joined the LiveJournal, Inc. team in 2008 as Director of Finance. She is responsible for all financial and administrative roles. Prior to joining LiveJournal, she spent 13 years in the advertising industry at Publicis & Hal Riney, where she most recently served as CFO. Prior to those positions, Stephanie was a Senior Audit Manager at KPMG. Some of her more interesting clients included the California Academy of Sciences, the de Young Museum and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Stephanie also has a passion for culinary arts and interior design.

Tupshin Harper
Director of Development

Tupshin oversees all U.S. engineering for LiveJournal, Inc. Tupshin also manages all aspects of LJ Labs, the LJ forum for discussion and development of new features, applications and ideas. Tupshin joins LiveJournal following two years as lead architect and head of engineering at Jangl, where he developed their mobile communications platform. Prior to that position, Tupshin was senior architect at Locus Technologies, which provides on-demand environmental data and information management services to Fortune 500 companies. Tupshin combines his expertise in computer engineering with a passion for physics and music.

Gregory Kennedy
Global Creative Director

With over a decade of multidisciplinary design and creative experience, Gregory has held advertising, design or account leadership roles for clients and employers including Millions of Us, Cyworld, Scion, Nike, Kodak, Estee Lauder, IBM, Cingular Wireless, and The Walt Disney Company. He began his career at the highly regarded New York City design shop Oven Digital, where he pioneered the use of rich media, including flash and streaming video on the web. Gregory has been the recipient of many advertising and design awards including, two Gold Pencils. He also was a guest of the French Government and presenter at the first International Festival of Film and Internet in Lille, France. Gregory's portfolio is available at www.gregorykennedy.com.