Mark, the third of four children, grew up watching 3-2-1 Contact and Transformers. He thinks these childhood passions put him on a path toward working in the world of technology. Mark, now a father of two daughters, has been known to encourage his girls to watch "Sid The Science Kid" since 3-2-1 Contact is no longer on the air.

Prior to founding Zoodles, Mark was a co-founder of Shelfari, a social network built around reading (acquired by Amazon) and Director of Product Marketing at Dash Navigation, a connected GPS service (acquired by Research in Motion). In 2004, Mark and his wife Tara, also launched MyTinyHands, a business centered around keeping babies healthy. Mark has an engineering degree from the University of Illinois and a Masters in Business Administration from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Rich's favorite toys as a child were the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64.

This led him to study computer science as a National Merit Scholar at Drexel University before moving to California. Since then, he has developed software in numerous fields, including navigation, marketing, web search and publishing, machine vision, desktop publishing and molecular modeling. His current favorite toys are the iPhone and World of Warcraft.

As a kid, Jeff spent a lot of time building stuff and working on projects with his dad (who was also an engineer).

All the problem solving required during those projects inspired Jeff to choose a career in software engineering where he can solve interesting problems and build things every day. Jeff also learned the importance of education from his mother who is a kindergarten teacher. Jeff chose to work at Zoodles because he loves the idea of using his education and skills to build software that makes kids smarter.

With the exception of Saturday mornings watching TMNT, Rachel spent most of her childhood forcing her younger brothers to play school and check out books from her makeshift library.

Since then her nose has never left the books, recently graduating from Stanford with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems, a B.A. in Comparative Literature, and a Masters in Education studying Learning, Design, and Technology. Working at Zoodles has only strengthened her tyrannical desire to show all kids that learning can be fun.

As a child, Michael Portuesi remembers when a grown-up would turn the dial on the TV to the right channel so he could watch Sesame Street. As a teenager, he read (and wrote articles for!) magazines like "Creative Computing" and programmed classic '80's computers like the TRS-80, Apple II, and Atari 800.

After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with a degree in computer science, he went on to develop many software products including audio and video applications, interactive TV experiences, and e-commerce websites for some of the world's largest companies. He is thrilled to apply his engineering experience towards building new features for Zoodles.

Though TV sets no longer have dials, Michael still enjoys watching Blues Clues, Pokemon, or Rolie Polie Olie when he can find the right channel.

As a child Dave loved to dance like a maniac to the opening sequence of Sesame Street, Square One and 3-2-1 Contact. He also loved the independence of playing games on the Speak and Spell and Apple II that he shared with his older sister.

Prior to joining Zoodles, Dave was a User Experience Designer for Google on several core products (Maps, Docs, Gmail, Adwords) and some really fun 20% projects (Trends, Moderator). He has also worked for Scholastic.com and was a Teachers Assistant for Kindergarten, Pre-K and Preschool classes at a Reggio Emilia™ school. Dave attended Carnegie Mellon University where he received his bachelors degree from the College of Fine Arts and his masters degree from the School of Computer Science.