Gary Flake, Salesforce.com

Dr. Gary William Flake is the CTO of Search & Data Science at Salesforce. He is responsible for the vision, strategy and product development for the search platform that powers the world’s #1 CRM company.

Flake joined Salesforce in 2013 and brings more than 25 years of search, data mining, machine learning and R&D experience. Flake is the author of The Computational Beauty of Nature, has filed over 150 patents, and has been recognized by several industry and academic institutes.

Prior to Salesforce, Flake was founder and CEO of Clipboard Inc., which was acquired by Salesforce in May 2013. Prior to founding Clipboard, Flake was a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where he was responsible the technology vision and future direction of the MSN portal, web search, desktop search and commercial search efforts.

Prior to Microsoft, Flake founded Yahoo! Research Labs, ran Yahoo!’s corporate R&D activities and company-wide innovation effort, and was Overture's Chief Science Officer. Before joining Overture, Flake was a research scientist at NEC Research Institute and the leader of its Web data-mining program.

Flake holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.