About Us

The Picnik team is headquartered in downtown Seattle. We love making great software for real people, eating the food at Pike Place Market, and taking pictures that bring to life great memories of times we've had with family and friends.

Interested in joining the team, partnering with us, or just want to tell us what you think about Picnik?

Looking for Press info? Visit press.picnik.com.

Jonathan Sposato / CEO

Jonathan is a serial entrepreneur. Prior to Picnik, Jonathan was the founder and CEO of Phatbits, which he sold to Google in 2005. This allowed for the deployment of Google Desktop Gadgets & Sidebar, which was awarded PC Magazine's "Best Gadgets Platform." Phatbits has since become a key component of Google's overall desktop applications strategy and continues to reach millions of users daily. Prior to Phatbits, Jonathan worked as a senior manager in Microsoft's consumer division. When he's not at work, Jonathan can be seen sitting at a bar he owns talking to complete strangers about Picnik and 'web-two-point-oh.'

Darrin Massena / Picnik Co-Founder, CTO

Darrin has been avidly developing software for the last 25 years. Prior to Picnik, Darrin was a co-founder of Spiffcode, and the co-author of ground breaking real-time strategy game Warfare Incorporated, which was named "Handheld Game of the Year" by Palm Computing in 2003. Darrin was a founding member of the Palm Open Source community and brought the first Windows development tools to the platform. He previously was a development manager at Microsoft, where he was a "Leonardo DaVinci Award" winner, and where he and Mike took turns managing each other. Darrin is also a collector... of dusty handhelds his wife refers to as "the PDA museum." Original Apple Newton? Check. Sharp Zaurus? Check. Extremely rare Sony Magic Link? Believe it.

Mike Harrington / Picnik Co-Founder, COO

Prior to Picnik, Mike co-founded Valve Software where he was the director of development for Half-Life, an industry phenomenon that sold more than 10 million copies and won more than 50 "Game of the Year" awards. PC Gamer magazine, the best selling PC games publication, has repeatedly named Half-Life "the best PC game of all time." Prior to Valve, Mike worked as a development manager for the Microsoft consumer division, Microsoft Windows NT User Interface team and the OS/2 graphics engine team. Mike loves getting into the outdoors, and recently bought a mountain bike that seems to be beating him up.

Peter Roman / Lead Designer

Peter was the only kid in the fourth grade with a business card. Self-made to match his website, Peter had already embraced the holistic method he continues to bring to his work. From his award-winning freelance work to his work as lead designer on a number of Real Networks properties and to his current vocation running brand, design and UI for Picnik, Peter has tirelessly worked towards achieving a gestalt experience across his projects. A dedicated neophile, he brings to his work an ability to embrace and normalize all the latest technologies that surround our everyday lives, facilitating a seamless adoption of those technologies by his audience. In his spare time, Peter enjoys mining the internets for new additions to his LOLcat collection, debating with himself why that pixel really should be moved 3 pixels to the left, and using the word "gestalt."

Brian Terry / Quixotic Softographer

Polyglot, international adventurer and internet developer extraordinaire, Brian comes to Picnik with more than 10 years of experience in building great websites. After earning his computer science degree at Stanford, he spent five years at Homestead.com, one year in Norway (fjords!), and five years at Expedia. At the advanced age of 10 years old, Brian won his first computer in a programming contest from Apple. Nowadays, outside of work, he enjoys taking pictures of (read: chasing after) his 2-year-old son, climbing mountains, and dodging traffic on his bicycle.

Justin Huff / Penguin Handler

Justin's diverse software engineering background includes earlier projects of sonar, home automation, and high performance databases. He has also been running and administering Linux systems for 8 years, and brings all that experience and more to his work at Picnik. Being a member of that rare breed, a native Seattleite, Justin doesn't even notice anymore a weather report of "cloud cover with a chance of rain."

Monica Harrington / Chief Marketing Officer

Prior to joining Picnik, Monica was a senior policy officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, managing foundation-wide communications. She had previously managed marketing and business development for Valve (for more on Valve, read Mike's bio and then ponder the chances that there are two Harringtons at Picnik). Before Valve, Monica worked at Microsoft, where she earned the Consumer Division's Market Maker award for having the biggest impact on the bottom line. Monica also works as a strategic advisor to NetHope, a tech-oriented collaborative consortium of leading international NGOs. Monica thinks any photo of a Springer Spaniel (Ok, make that "Emma or Franklin") is a work of art.

Steve Leroux / Software Engineer, Importer of Fine Teas

Representing our Northern Neighbors and bringing a diverse background to Picnik, Steve has experience in developing multimedia frameworks (Microsoft), mobile messaging applications (Vazu), and next-generation web services (Feedwhip). Steve received his BS from the University of British Columbia where he assisted research into issues of gender and educational software. Steve enjoys soccer, gardening, and encouraging his two-year-old daughter to stomp on things. Steve's favorite tea is a second-flush SFTGFOP organic darjeeling from the Makaibari estate.

Charlie Whiton / Test Manager, Community Relations Guy

Charlie worked for Microsoft and then Expedia for 14 years in some capacity as a Tester then Test Management, peaking in a killer assignment to Beijing where he sharpened the product development team for Expedia's China subsidiary. His enthusiasm for photography dates back to his high school days messing around with an entry-level 35 mm camera and was cemented when, drawing on his newfound darkroom abilities and a great deal of luck, he won a local photo competition. Soon he was blowing his cash on motor-drives and other high-powered gear just like the professional d00dz, or at least as far as his allowance would go. These days, Charlie likes trudging out into the backcountry somewhere and (while perhaps developing and utilizing best practices) trying to find his way back.

Alastair Sutherland / Data Stylist, Baritone-in-Residence

Originally from Berkeley, CA, Alastair quickly established his Seattle Cred with the obligatory stints at Microsoft and Amazon, but played Dot-Com roulette for most of his career, applying himself to trades as varied as automotive navigation, supply-chain management, document imaging, call centers, catalog databases, and good old fashioned box software. He has lived in Osaka, Sydney and London, and has quite literally bicycled the length and breadth of the country, biking solo from Vancouver, BC to Tijuana, Mexico, and later from Seattle to New York City. Outside of work, he maintains a wistful jealousy of his son's world, populated by pirates, dinosaurs and flying robots. He also puts his bass-baritone voice to use in singing Italian opera, lending his skills as a journeyman propellerhead to us only until his debut as Scarpia at The Met.

Ali Fisher / Picnik Community Therapist

Born and raised in the City to the East: Bellevue, Wa, Ali's wanderlust first took her to Hamilton College in exotic upstate New York, where she earned her BA in English, then to South Africa, Ireland, England, Nepal, Cambodia and most recently Peru. Her work experience so far includes working as an actress on a murder mystery dinner train and working on a wildlife preserve in South Africa, both experiences giving her valuable skills she brings to her current work answering our users' feedback.

K Michael Alexander / Designer

A recent transplant to these moister climes from sunny Spokane, Michael recently worked as a senior UX/UI designer on digital casino games. Before that, he was racking up thousands of logo and branding design projects, in addition to web design, print media design, and assorted freelance work. His UI/UX experience dates back to making interactive paper games for his friends in grade school, but fearing a life of penury failed to pursue this as a profession until a university professor convinced him to take a commercial art and design course. Outside of the appurtenances of his profession, he enjoys science fiction, video games, and pirates. He would also like to point out that he was for pirates before pirates were cool.

Brenda Anderson / Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations

Brenda joined Team Picnik remotely to manage the Picnik Antipodean Branch Offices, located in Masterton, a bustling country town just a mountain range away from the capital city of Wellington, New Zealand. Originally of a more domestically American persuasion, Brenda took her BS in Biological Bases of Behaviour and promptly took a job in the financial business. After a few years working, and traveling, as a consultant, she decided to give in to the seductive buzzings of the travel bug, and next thing you know, she's finds herself in a medieval German town being swept up in a fairy tale romance and relocating permanently to New Zealand where she now lives with her husband and three children.

Amanda Sutherland / Office Manager, Herder of Cats

A native of Vancouver (not BC), Washington (not DC), Amanda brings her prodigious experience in rearranging copy room cupboards to this mostly paperless startup existence in order to provide administrative services, receptionist duties, and finally order that filing cabinet Jonathan has always dreamt of. With most of her experience in the real estate and childcare markets (with a brief departure into front loader driving for a rockery), Amanda loves wakeboarding, snowboards on Mount Hood in the winter, and dreams of searching for lost treasure with her under-sea welding fiancé.

Sonia Ramos / Picnik Community Therapist, Delegada de los Hispanohablantes

Sonia comes to us from the University of Washington Spanish Studies department, where she'll earn her BA at the end of this year and where she presides over the University's Delta Zeta sorority. Originally from Renton, Washington (just a little south of here), Sonia has family in Ecuador, and has travelled there and in Peru where she volunteered with an after-school program for disadvantaged children, and onwards to see Machu Picchu. An accomplished swing and salsa dancer, Sonia plans on putting her language skills in towards a career in either healthcare, education, technology, or healthcare education technology, and enjoys vacationing anywhere out of doors generally, but specifically somewhere with a beach, in the sun, and completely dissimilar to Seattle.