About Us
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Vinay and Arka
Attending Saints @ Seahawks, where Marshawn Lynch caused an earthquake
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Sidelines was founded by Vinay Kuruvila, Arka Ray and Marios Assiotis -- three friends who have known each other for over 10 years and decided to put the ridiculous amount of time they spent following, watching and discussing sports to good use by building a product that would capture the passion that every sports fan feels for their favorite teams and players.
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Marios and Arka
At their old place in Vancouver, definitely not discussing the Canucks
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They felt that while sports fans loved to talk about sports, there wasn't a good destination for them to do so online. Twitter, while great for blasting out an opinion or a link is not set up for conversations.
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Most team forums and message boards have user experiences that look like something from 1999 and trolls often bring down the level of conversation. The comment sections of many sports blogs are fairly active but end-users can't start up discussions on topics of their own choice.
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The team therefore decided to build Sidelines as a community for sports fans to share and discuss opinions, articles, photos and videos with other fans. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, where updates about sports often don't reach the right people and get mixed with up with cat videos and wedding albums, on Sidelines, a fan can easily reach his friends who are interested in his teams that he is, as well as the broader community around those teams.
The Team
Vinay Kuruvila
Founder & CEO
Before Sidelines, Vinay spent 6 years in various roles at Amazon. When he left, he was a Software Development Manager, managing a 16 person organization of engineers, program managers and product managers. He led the development of several internal platform products including the web application frameworks that are used to build all Amazon websites worldwide. Vinay holds a degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. Outside of work, Vinay enjoys skiing, following the Seattle Seahawks and eating leftovers (any kind, really).
Arka Ray
Founder & President
Before Sidelines, Arka was a Business Development Manager at Microsoft in the Xbox LIVE division, where he negotiated several multi-million dollar deals with game publishers. Arka went to UC Berkeley (with Vinay) and holds a BSc in Computer Science. He spends an obscene amount of time following sports (the Cal Golden Bears, Seattle Seahawks, Green Bay Packers, Roger Federer and Michael Schumacher are his favorites) and watching every movie and TV show he can find in his quest to become a pop-culture deity.
Marios Assiotis
Founder & CTO
Marios is the chief code monkey with over a decade of professional development experience. As a Sr Software Engineer at Microsoft in the Hotmail storage platform, he helped store bits faster, cheaper and more reliably. Marios holds a BSc in Computer Science from MIT. When he’s not writing code, he’s either snowboarding, cooking elaborate meals for his friends or obsessively reading Hacker News.
Skaff Elias
Game Design Consultant
The most recent addition to the Sidelines team, Skaff, was one of the first designers of the game, Magic: The Gathering. As a Senior Vice President at Wizards of the Coast, Skaff was the primary architect of the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour and the organized play system behind the Pokemon card game. When he’s not working, Skaff is busy hiking with his kids and maintaining the highest (enjoyment of playing basketball)/(skill at playing basketball) ratio of any person that has ever lived.
Contact Us
team@sidelinesapp.com