Gabor Cselle - About Me

I'm the VP Engineering at Xobni, a San Francisco startup. We're working on radically improving your email experience. Our software has been covered by the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek. Bill Gates demoed Xobni in a keynote speech. Thousands of users work with Xobni for hours every day.

Before Xobni, I was a a software engineer at Google in Zurich, Switzerland. At Google, I worked on a variety of confidential things as well as Gmail. I have a Master's degree in computer science from ETH Zurich. I have also worked in graphic design, interned at Yahoo and Google, and as a research and teaching assistant in college.

I've helped organize BarCampZurich.

You can find my blog, in which I talk about life, technology, and travel, here.

Contact

Gabor Cselle
Xobni Corp.
211 Sutter Street, Suite 300
San Francisco, CA 94108
United States of America (map)

Email: Listed here.

How do you pronounce my name?

My name is of Hungarian origin. My first name is pronounced ""Gábor", with a long "a". My last name is "Cselle": It's pronounced like "challenge", but without the "nge".

International Confusion

I was born in Budapest, Hungary where I went to elementary school. I went to "Gymnasium" in Germany, spent a year in high school in the US, and studied at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. I now live in San Francisco.

Interests

Art: I like art by Eduard Hopper and French impressionists (Monet, Manet, Cézanne, etc). Jackson Pollack, and Mark Rothko round off this mainstream line-up. My favorite architects are Norman Foster and Santiago Calatrava - the former for his care for the environment and the latter for the emotion he trapped in glass, stone, and steel.

Computer stuff: I'm interested in a number of areas: Distributed systems, information systems, and systems programming. Also, I am very interested in making things user friendly, without sacrificing functionality.
Jacob Nielsen wrote "Bad usability equals no customers", and I agree. But that doesn't mean that every page needs to look like this one, or that every device may only have as many buttons as an iPod shuffle. Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Music: There are some extremely embarrassing pictures of me mimicking aliens with headphones. Still, all that embarrassment didn't make me quit listening to music (even with headphones) and abandon my CD collection or iPod. The latter contains "cool-sounding German titles and teen-age girl music"

Movies: High Fidelity, Lost In Translation, Good Will Hunting, The Godfather 3, Adaptation, Downtown Switzerland, Office Space, Im Juli, Good Bye Lenin!, Finding Nemo, Spy Games

Sports: Swimming, biking, in-line skating, basketball and Yoga. I also love sailing.

Other interests include economics, business, architecture, and graphic design.