Greg Bolcer is a talented, high-tech executive who has held multiple Chief Technology (CTO) and founder positions at several of Orange County's most successful startup companies. A colleague of his best described him this way: "[Greg has a] brain for math, finesse with computers, the eyes of an artist, and the heart of an entrepreneur." His passion for computer sciences, software engineering, graphics, gaming, cybersecurity, machine learning, and Web technologies lead him to 3 degrees: a BS and PhD from UCI's ICS in '89 and '98 and a MS from USC in '93.
Greg has deep roots in the history of UCI and Orange County. When it came to choosing a college, there was only one choice. His great grandparents on his mom's side of the family were orange ranchers in Orange County. His dad was a football star from NJIT (New Jersey Institute of Technology) who came to OC in the 60s to pursue an engineering career in the aerospace industry. His Godfather, Bill Lochrie, was the very first PhD out of the school of engineering.
While he was earning his B.S. in Information & Computer Sciences at UC Irvine, he lettered on UCI's nationally ranked water polo team, helped support himself through college by working as a beach lifeguard for the City of Laguna, and saved up whenever he could to take surfing trips to remote locations.
After graduation, Greg started his career working for Prof. Richard Taylor as a DARPA funded programmer in ICS after being introduced to software engineering through a undergrad project course taught by Prof. Debra Richardson. Never one to shy away from hard work, he earned his MS from USC while being both a full time student at USC and a full time employee at UCI. After a couple of years of research, he joined the PhD program in 1995. He was the project lead for the world's largest Java project outside of Sun Labs in 1995. While at ICS, he built the world's very first microservices architecture based on HTTP, WebDAV, and the REST architectural style called Magi (Micro-Apache Generic Interface) by developing a peer-to-peer version of the Apache HTTP open source project.
Greg's strong work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit combined with standing on the shoulders of his other colleagues lead to being involved in a string of early stage startups. Greg founded three startup companies himself, worked for three others including his current one, and has been an advisor to at least a dozen others. Greg throughout the course of his career has authored close to two dozen software patents and broken a lot of new ground creating innovative, new software products. He also is an active participant in OC's startup community and regularly conducts due diligence for investors and reviews for early stage entrepreneurs. He's been a judge for ICS's student startup contests and a visiting lecturer both at UCI and USC from time to time.
His first effort after graduation, Greg licensed his own technology from UCI to start his first company called Endeavors. Greg negotiated the sale of Endeavors in March 2000 to Tadpole Technology, a London Stock Exchange based high tech company. The Orange County Register on the front page of its business section described the company's product as the "Net's Next Napster", a wildy successful music sharing technology at the time, because of its convenient, decentralized collaborative capabilities. Greg was also elected by over 150 companies to be the architecture chair for Intel's peer to peer standards working group. Greg was responsible for two acquisitions which helped build up the technology team and products. Because of this work, UCI awarded him the 2004 Lauds and Laurel's Distinguish Alumnus award.
In 2005, Greg and Encryptanet co-founder Clay Cover (another ICS alumni), created the world's first blockchain. It was an encryption based technology that used off-the-shelf encryption to chain together information into a trusted web that could be validated without centralized control. Encryptanet launched its first product called Paycloud as the first and only PayPal micropayments partner. Customers included gaming companies providing digital access to virtual goods and the global media company Forbes.
After helping convert an appliance based security company into the world's first security-as-a-service vendor, Greg's third venture in 2009 was a visual computing company doing reverse image searching and identification of objects in online media pictures. That company was called Kerosene and a Match after "the fastest way to find a needle in a haystack". Greg pioneered the world's first use of GPU technology, aka graphics processing video cards, to do AI analysis of pictures. It grew out of his previous work using GPUs to do encryption and string search acceleration. While commonplace now, using GPUs for AI was unheard of at the time. Keroene's first big customer was the largest social media platform of the era who wanted to use our technology in real-time to identify the brands of bottles, cans, and cars in posted photographs. The company was designated "America's Most Promising Company" of 2009 by Forbes magazine.
Greg's current position is Chief Data Officer at Bitvore Corporation where he has been since 2012. Using vast AI and computing resources, he processes, cleans, and analyzes 100% of the world's English business news and alternative data on a daily basis. Most of the world's ratings agencies, national banks, and financial institutions use our products or data to feed into their own deep learning and AI systems to do predictive analytics or financial surveillance. Predictions might include where Amazon's new HQ2 (their second headquarters) will be located or figuring out which city in the US is next to get into financial trouble or what companies will need to raise money or layoff workers. Bitvore has been recognized twice as one of Orange County's best tech startups by the Tech Tribune two years in a row.
Greg lives in Yorba Linda with his wife Kris, who still works at UCI in ICS, and his son Jax who is a volleyball player and a senior at Servite High School in Anaheim and Tobin who is a soccer player and a freshman at Orange Lutheran in Orange.