Short bio:

Hello, I'm David Papandrew, welcome to my website. Friends and coworkers often call me “Papa”. I’m interested in habits, ideas, learning and self-improvement and entrepreneurship. Technology is always near and dear to my heart as well. I've worked in Silicon Valley for the past 20 years. I co-founded two tech companies during that time: Fanpop (a youth social network) and Revel (enterprise artificial intelligence). I currently reside in San Francisco, California.

Long bio:

I was born on the island of Oahu in beautiful Hawaii in the early 70s. Upon graduating from high school I headed to the “mainland” for college. I attended Occidental College for my undergraduate degree and Harvard University for my graduate degree.

Following my time on the East Coast, I headed back to California and set my roots in the Bay Area during the Dotcom Boom. Over the course of a decade I worked at Charles Schwab (online trading support), Yahoo! (on the popular Yahoo Finance property), Yodlee (financial data aggregator) and Ziff Davis Media (video game and technology news properties).

In 2006, I started my entrepreneurial journey when I started Fanpop with a group of friends. The site quickly became a popular destination for enthusiastic discussion about youth pop culture topics such as movies, music and television. Our small team grew from nothing to a peak audience of 65 million monthly unique users consuming nearly a quarter billion page-views a month.

After leaving Fanpop in 2015, I traveled and worked on side projects. One project was the development of a portfolio of mobile applications for medical professionals. The published apps include the Oral Contraceptive Reference, the Estimated Fetal Weight Calculator, the VBAC Calculator, Apgar Score and Bishop Score applications. Together these applications have been seen over 20,000 downloads. The apps were all designed and developed by me via a mix of development tools including Apple’s Swift, Corona SDK/Lua, Appmachine/Javascript.

In 2018, I co-founded Revel, Inc. with two of my former Fanpop colleagues. Revel develops machine learning solutions for enterprise customers. Revel's first product was an image recognition service that allowed companies to accurately process large amounts of data quickly and inexpensively. I left Revel in mid-2019 to spend more time with my family and work on new projects.

I’ve been happily married for over 20 years and am the proud father to 3 kids. I still visit Hawaii annually and dream of retiring there someday. Like most people from Hawaii, I do like SPAM and will never turn my nose up at a well-crafted SPAM musubi.

I’m an avid “Apple guy” having grown up with an Apple IIe and the original 128k Mac at home. Despite a brief dalliance with Toshiba laptops in the mid-90s during the “darkest days” of Apple, there’s always been a Mac in my home and I remain committed to the ecosystem (the power of lock-in).

Music figures prominently into my extracurriculars. I grew up playing and studying a number of instruments including guitar, ukulele, cello and voice. For the past few years I’ve been resuscitating my piano skills and have been committed to daily practice. My current “stretch” piece is Brahms Opus 118, No. 2 which I will be able to play at tempo one of these days.

I’m an avid reader and podcast listener. My favorite book genres are non-fiction, fantasy and science fiction. My favorite podcasts are 99% Invisible, How I Built This, Reply All and Focused. I love classic video games and play a couple of current titles like Blizzard’s Overwatch and Clash Royale.