A "stealth" startup called Black Pearl Systems has been quietly growing in the hands of the former head of engineering at Apple, Tim Bucher. The company has grown to 44 poached employees—and the list is jaw-dropping.
Company job listings say the company exists to "create a category-defining product to tackle a problem that faces billions of technology users," which, for some rumor sites, indicates a tablet Android device. At least we know it’s definitely hardware related—not only because of the way the staff is filling out—see our complete rundown below—but because Black Pearl just joined the Consumer Electronics Association and booked space for CES 2014.
The top people at BPS read like a who’s-who of Silicon Valley heavy hitters. According to GigaOM’s Janko Roettgers, it's rumored there will be top people coming from YouTube and Intel as well, but without full LinkedIn access to everyone on staff, we weren’t able to verify who. Here’s what we know about the people comprising Black Pearl Systems so far:
Tim Bucher
worked at Apple from 2003 to 2004 as VP of Macintosh System Development and then Senior VP of Macintosh Hardware Engineering. He oversaw the team that launched the Mac mini and also worked on the iMac and iPod. He worked at Sansa Connect from 2006 to 2008 and founded the collaborative music service ZING Systems, which was acquired by Dell in 2007, and where he remained as chief product officer before moving to Black Pearl.
Ain McKendrick
Cofounder and VP of user experience at BPS was one of Palm’s founding engineers and was senior director of Partner Products at Netflix. He was also a senior director at ZING and a senior member at TiVo.
Scott Smyers
The content CTO was an exec at Sony and Sunrise Digital Strategies. He also founded the DLNA consortium in 2003.
Joseph Palmer
BPS’s senior systems engineer (who doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile we could find) was an Apple engineer in the early '90s and was director of hardware engineering at Danger from 2000 to 2005, where he pioneered the Sidekick’s swivel hinge. He also worked at ZING Systems with Bucher and McKendrick, beginning when it was acquired by Dell.
Jeff Ma
As director of UX, Ma specializes in visual UI design. Ma created the Apple TV UI during his seven years at Apple and worked at MonsterGecko and TiVo before that, where he overlapped with McKendrick for two years.
Greg Orzell
A team cofounder and cloud specialist, he came from Cloud Architect and worked on streaming and system stability at Netflix. He’s also, apparently, a SlideShare fan.
Piecing Together The Rest Of The Team
Here are the remainder of Black Pearl Systems’ 44 employees according to LinkedIn. Looking at the titles here—any specific guesses on what these guys are building? Let me know by tweeting @lilyhnewman and we can all engage in some rampant speculation. Fun!
Bethany B.
VP of Talent Strategy at SSBP
Christian K.
CTO Services at SSBP
Randeep Singh Gakhal
Director of Software Enginering at SSBP
Lilian D.
Recruiting at SSBP
Rich E.
Head of Strategic Partnerships at SSBP
Nick N.
Director of Business Operations at SSBP
Scott S.
Content CTO/Cofounder at SSBP
Curtis S.
Current: Software PM at SSBP
Paul O.
Director of Product Management at SSBP
Andrea T.
QA Engineer at SSBP
Rebecca B.
Director-Brand Marketing SSBP
Julie P.
Senior Engineering Manager, SSBP
Valerie S.
VP, Business Development at SSBP
Jeff M.
Director of User Experience at SSBP
Brian M.
Sr. DevOps Engineer at SSBP
Tony M.
Scurvy Bilge Rat at SSBP
Stanley H.
Senior Software Engineer at SSBP
Greg O.
sudo MCP-Founding Team at SSBP
Justin L.
Senior User Experience Designer at SSBP
Edgar L.
iOS Developer at SSBP
Peter S.
Principal Engineer at SSBP
Hannah D.
Business Admin. Manager at SSBP
Rick P.
Senior Software Scallywag at SSBP
Vidya Devarasetty
Manager-Software Quality Assurance at SSBP
Jyri V.
Builder at SSBP
TJ S.
Senior Software Engineer at SSBP
Andy Y.
System Development at SSBP
Robey P.
Coder at SSBP
Sri K.
Senior Software QA Engineer at SSBP
Stephen S.
Senior Software Engineer at SSBP
C J S.
Senior Software Engineer at SSBP
Rex C.
Developer/Founding Team at SSBP
John C.
Software Engineering Manager at SSBP
Sascha S.
Senior Software Pirate at Black Pearl Systems and SSBP
Xiaohan H.
Software Engineer at SSBP
Arielle Orbach-Smith
Recruiting Researcher at SSBP
Colleen H.
Director of Product Technology and Architecture at SSBP
[Image: Flickr user Eric]
