▸ About Us

Meet the Team

Dan Fain, Ph.D.

Dan Fain, a former technology executive at Expedia, eBay, Microsoft, and Yahoo, established Cache Hits LLC for a variety of innovative projects. He also invests in and advises startups, primarily via Y Combinator.

Dr. Fain earned a PhD in computation and neural systems from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2001. He has extensive expertise in search engines and recommender systems, online advertising, and marketplaces, as well as experience in financial technology and system-level infrastructure. He has led global teams developing global and localized products (for example with machine translation).

At eBay, he and his team were able to demonstrate the business value of their search and recommendations innovations year after year via controlled experimentation (“A/B tests”). He played a key role in bringing machine translation to cross-border trade, enabling buyers and sellers to communicate without speaking the same language; and brought reverse image search to eBay’s mobile app, enabling customers to point a mobile phone camera at an object and find relevant products from eBay’s marketplace.

After graduate school, he joined GoTo.com, the pioneer in search advertising. He managed development of the Nutch open-source search engine, and as part of that project, the first version of the Hadoop data platform. At Yahoo, he developed technology for relevance of search and advertising. Later, at Microsoft, he developed “the most noticeable new feature” (NY Times) of the initial launch of the Bing search engine.

He mentors students and professionals at various career stages across the globe from diverse backgrounds.

He can be reached via his Linkedin Profile