Education
Ly's speciality at Stanford included computer science, linguistics, philosophy and artificial intelligence. While studying at the university he did research in areas of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, created a software called Tarski's World on the NeXT platform. In addition, he worked with professor Terry Winograd, who had influence on his interests in computer science.
After graduating from Stanford in 1991 Eric Ly entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he did research into intelligent agents and speech user interfaces. His master thesis was titled "Chatter: a conversational telephone agent".
Career
Eric Ly began his career at IBM (an American multinational technology and consulting corporation) where he worked on the development of the NeXTstep software. In 1993 he started working for Sun corporation as a software engineer where he was a part of the very first Java team.
In the capacity of a senior software engineer at General Magic Ly designed and implemented several mobile applications.
In 1995 Eric Ly founded a company called Critical Path to create a new generation of web-based project management collaboration products. He built there the initial engineering team and helped shipped several versions of the product. But after that the company was acqusited by Critical Path.
From 2000 till 2002 Eric Ly worked in such companies as Tresidder Networks (which he founded) and Enactex.
But the most famous contribution in the world of business he made as a co-founder and CTO of LinkedIn, the company which connects the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. Eric Ly helped launch LinkedIn and also made a contribution to it's strategic guidance at the executive level. With LinkedIn for more than three years Ly helped the company to create a growing member base and created some capabilities of the product such as desktop integrations.
Eric Ly is currently Founder and CEO of Presdo. Founded by a team from LinkedIn, Presdo’s mission is to increase the value of your social networks through face-to-face and real-time interactions where valuable relationships develop. In particular whith the help of the company's applications sponsors and attendees can connect with each other at conferences and trade shows.
