Bart Decrem is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who, most recently, headed the Mobile Games business for

The Walt Disney Company The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...

between July 2010 and the Fall of 2013. He was born and raised in

Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...

Early life

His first entrepreneurial venture was at the age of 13, when he started a weekly magazine for Belgium’s leading underground radio station while working as a DJ there. Decrem moved to the US to study law at Stanford University. After graduation, Decrem founded Plugged In, a non-profit organization in East Palo Alto that provided community members with Internet access and related educational programs. Plugged In was one of the first such Digital Divide programs in the United States.

Career

In 1999, Decrem co-founded

Eazel Eazel was an American software company operating from 1999 to 2001 in Palo Alto and then Mountain View, California. The company's flagship product is the Nautilus file manager for the GNOME desktop environment on Linux, which was immediately adop ...

, an open source

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

desktop start-up. Their software, Nautilus, continues to be popular among Linux users. Among other projects, he coordinated the creation of the

GNOME Foundation GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Orinda, California, United States, coordinating the efforts in the GNOME project. Purpose The GNOME Foundation works to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platfor ...

. After Eazel shut down in 2001, Decrem spent 18 months in Seoul, doing business development for several local startups. In 2003-2004, Decrem headed marketing and business affairs for the

Mozilla Foundation The Mozilla Foundation (stylized as moz://a) is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, ...

. He coordinated

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...

marketing activities, including branding, the Firefox 1.0 launch and the creation of Spread Firefox, the community marketing effort for Firefox. He also headed up partnerships with

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology c ...

and

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, wi ...

. His work for Mozilla was sponsored by

Mitch Kapor Mitchell David Kapor ( ; born November 1, 1950) is an American entrepreneur best known for his work as an application developer in the early days of the personal computer software industry, later founding Lotus, where he was instrumental in deve ...

’s Open Source Applications Foundation. After leaving Mozilla, he started Flock, a startup building a social web browser. Angel investors in Flock included

Josh Kopelman Joshua Kopelman is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist. Kopelman is best known as a founder of First Round Capital, a pioneering seed-stage venture fund that led the seed round in Uber. Josh has consistently been ran ...

Gil Penchina Gil or GIL may refer to: Places * Gil Island (disambiguation), one of several islands by that name * Gil, Iran, a village in Hormozgan Province, Iran * Hil, Azerbaijan, also spelled ''Gil, a village in Azerbaijan * Hiloba, also spelled ''Gil, ...

Joe Kraus Joe Kraus is the founder of Excite, JotSpot, and DigitalConsumer.org, along with his long-time business partner Graham Spencer. Currently, Kraus is an Investment Partner on the GV team and President at Lime. Career A long time entrepreneur, K ...

Scott Kurnit Scott P. Kurnit (born March 25, 1954) is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor in media and technology. Career Early career After graduating from Hampshire College with a BA in Communications, Kurnit became a Program Director at WGBY-TV (WGB ...

Stratton Sclavos Stratton Sclavos (born 1961) is an entrepreneur, chief executive, and venture investor in the technology, professional sports and lifestyle industries. He is currently a partner at Vision Venture Partners. He served as chairman and CEO of VeriSig ...

and others. VC investors included

Bessemer Venture Partners Bessemer Venture Partners (Bessemer) is an American venture capital firm. The firm has over $19 billion under management and invests globally, with offices in San Francisco, Redwood City, New York City, Boston, Israel, India, and London. Bessemer ...

, Catamount Ventures and Shasta Ventures. He was Flock’s CEO through its Series C, and left the company in the Summer of 2006. In 2007, Decrem worked as an Entrepreneur In Residence at DCM (Doll Capital Management). In January, 2008, Bart Decrem was Founder and CEO at

Tapulous Tapulous, Inc. was an American software and video game developer and publisher headquartered in Palo Alto, California. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company as part of Disney Interactive's Disney Mobile unit. The company's m ...

, one of the first iPhone startups.

Andrew Lacy Andrew is the English form of a given name common in many countries. In the 1990s, it was among the top ten most popular names given to boys in English-speaking countries. "Andrew" is frequently shortened to "Andy" or "Drew". The word is derived ...

was the Co-Founder at

. Tapulous is the company behind

Tap Tap Revenge ''Tap Tap Revenge'', also known as ''Tap Tap Revenge Classic'' was a music game created by Nate True, and developed and published by Tapulous for iOS in July 2008. It is the first game in Tapulous' ''Tap Tap'' series. Development for the game ...

one of the first major game hits on the App Store. In April, 2009, comScore announced that Tap Tap Revenge was the most popular App Store app of all times on the occasion on Apple’s announcement of the first one billion app downloads. At that time, according to comScore, Tap Tap Revenge was installed on 32% of all iPhones in the United States of America. In July, 2010 Tapulous was acquired by The Walt Disney Company. From July 2010 until June 2013 he was SVP and General Manager for Disney Mobile Games, the group behind the smartphone hits Where’s My Water, Temple Run: Oz and Where’s My Mickey. Decrem was recognized as one of the fifty most creative people in business in 2009 by

Fast Company ''Fast Company'' is a monthly American business magazine published in print and online that focuses on technology, business, and design. It publishes six print issues per year. History ''Fast Company'' was launched in November 1995 by Alan Web ...

, and one of the 10 most creative people in the Music Biz by

, He has also been featured in Advertising Age's "2010 Creativity 50" by

Creativity Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is formed. The created item may be intangible (such as an idea, a scientific theory, a musical composition, or a joke) or a physical object (such as an invention, a printed literary w ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Decrem, Bart Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Belgian businesspeople Chief executives in the technology industry Place of birth missing (living people) Stanford Law School alumni