Jordan Ritter

Ritter founded crowdsourcing company CloudCrowd with Alex Edelstein in April 2009. 6 months later, CloudCrowd officially launched its work platform on Facebook. In December 2010 the company renamed itself Servio while retaining the CloudCrowd brand, in order to more effectively differentiate the value propositions between online work and the crowdsourced work product.

After returning from Japan, Ritter was asked by Zivity Founders Scott Banister and Cyan Banister to advise the company on internal engineering management issues. Shortly afterwards, Ritter joined as CTO in order to overhaul the engineering organization while a CEO search was being conducted. In December 2008, a new CEO was appointed and Ritter left the company.

In 2007, Ritter hired Ejovi Nuwere into CME, and together they began building a Japanese-based, competition-oriented promotional platform for new artists called Otorevo. The premise of the project was to prove a more cost- and time-efficient model for discovering viable artists to join the label, while at the same time establishing the first foothold for what would become CME's digital media platform. Despite the measurable successes of Otorevo, the CME Board of Directors voted to terminate all R&D projects in March 2008.

Ritter was introduced to Columbia Music Entertainment (CME) CEO Sadahiko Hirose in early 2006 during a business trip to Tokyo. Hirose-san planned to modernize CME by building a digital media distribution platform for its 100-year-spanning catalog of music, much of which was being lost to physical degradation and abandoned digital recording formats.

Ritter joined CME in February 2006 as Executive Advisor to the CEO. In April 2006 he became CTO and formed the Red Dove (R&D) division, focusing on reducing costs and improving efficiency of internal operations, while developing new spinout companies that proved better approaches to the most expensive aspects of CME's business.

In the summer of 2001, Ritter started development on anti-spam technology using machine-learning statistical classification algorithms. Named Spilter, the software was originally an open-source system that ran on UNIX-compatible messaging infrastructure such as Sendmail, Postfix and Qmail. Following the success of the product's first release, Ritter was convinced to pursue it instead as a commercial enterprise, which led him to close-source the software and begin mapping out a business plan.

Throughout his tenure during 2001-2006, Ritter oversaw the architectural design and implementation of all Cloudmark commercial software, systems and operating infrastructure.

Ritter resigned from Napster on November 14, 2000.

Early in 1999, Netect was purchased by BindView. Ritter was retained in the acquisition.

While working for BindView, Ritter met Shawn Fanning online through an IRC channel for computer hackers called #!w00w00. In May 1999, Fanning began soliciting Ritter and several other w00w00 members for help.

Since Fanning initially refused to allow inspection of the source code, members took this as a challenge and began reverse-engineering various aspects of the service. Ritter and fellow w00w00 member Seth McGann focused on the protocol and backend software, identifying bugs and proposing likely fixes to Fanning, while w00w00 member Evan Brewer managed the system that the server ran on. In early June 1999, Fanning asked Ritter to fully take over development of the server while Fanning focused on the Windows client. Two months later, Yosi Amram invested $250,000 in Napster and required that company operations relocate from Massachusetts to California. Ritter moved to Silicon Valley in September 1999, initially sharing an apartment with Fanning and Sean Parker at the San Mateo Marriott Residence Inn.

Jordan Ritter was born in Northridge, California and grew up in Texas and Florida. Ritter skipped the 5th grade when he was 10, and later went on to graduate from the International Baccalaureate Program at Hillsborough High School. Ritter attended college at Lehigh University on scholarship, starting as a sophomore and pursuing a double-major in music and computer science. He dropped out in 1998, relocating to Boston, Massachusetts to begin his career in computer security.

Jordan Ritter (born February 1, 1978) is an American serial entrepreneur, software architect and angel investor. He is best known for his work at Napster, the file-sharing service he co-founded along with Shawn Fanning and others. His time at Napster was documented in Joseph Menn's book All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster and Alex Winter's film Downloaded.