Elaine Wherry
Elaine Wherry is a notable figure in the tech industry, best known as a cofounder of Meebo, a pioneering social media platform launched in 2005. Born in 1978 in Willard, Missouri, Wherry grew up on a farm, which instilled in her a strong work ethic and resilience. She attended Stanford University, where she earned a degree in symbolic systems with a focus on human/computer interaction, ultimately igniting her passion for technology. At Meebo, she played a crucial role in developing the platform’s user-friendly interface and various products like Meebo Messenger and Meebo Mobile, which allowed users to access multiple instant messaging services without the need for additional software.
Wherry's innovative vision helped Meebo quickly gain popularity, amassing millions of users by enabling seamless communication across different IM platforms. The company received significant venture capital backing and was eventually acquired by Google in 2012. In addition to her work at Meebo, Wherry has been involved in venture funding and has contributed to her husband’s chocolate business. She continues to emphasize the importance of subtle, effective design, drawing inspiration from her background in classical music. As a prominent female entrepreneur in a male-dominated field, Wherry advocates for greater representation of women in technology.
Subject Terms
Elaine Wherry
Cofounder of Meebo
- Born: 1978
- Place of Birth: Willard, Missouri
Primary Company/Organization: Meebo
Introduction
Elaine Wherry was one of the cofounders of the social media platform Meebo, created in 2005. She started the company with two other college friends in a California apartment. Meebo was a Web 2.0 company, part of a group of start-ups founded on the concept that the Internet is a platform of information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the web. Web 2.0 companies center on user-generated content and include blogs, wikis, and social networking sites. Meebo was a major web-based instant-messaging (IM) system in that, while it was not the first chat service, it quickly became the most popular because it was the most accessible and most convenient, allowing users to bypass software hurdles. Wherry developed Meebo's initial JavaScript framework in 2004. She was integral in creating products such as Meebo Messenger, Meebo Mobile, and the Meebo Bar. She oversaw the look and feel of all Meebo products.
Early Life
Elaine Wherry was born in the small town of Willard in southwest Missouri in 1978. She grew up on a farm, where her family raised and showed dairy goats. She described her childhood as humble, saying that it taught her the value of hard work. Farm work was full of ups and downs, creating situations to which Wherry later found parallels in the business world.
Wherry was also a dedicated member of the 4-H Youth Development Organization, a national youth-oriented group that develops citizenship, leadership, and responsibility. She began playing the violin at five and was classically trained as a violinist. However, she declined a full scholarship in music at a local college because she was not sure what she wanted to study.
Wherry has credited hard work and talks with her parents in helping her make her decision to pursue a career in computer science. Wherry spent a year after high school working as a volunteer before deciding to attend Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
Life's Work
Wherry first became interested in computers in a freshman calculus class, where she had to buy a graphing calculator. One day she was on a plane and tried to program the calculator to play a simple tic-tac-toe game. Although she could not get it to work, she was fascinated with the concept. Friends then suggested that she enroll in a computer programming class. Wherry earned a bachelor's degree in symbolic systems with a concentration in human/computer interaction at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in 2001.
While in college, Wherry worked for the web development company Synaptics, Inc., where she was a human factors researcher and later the manager of usability and design. She also quantified performance for devices such as touch sticks. She worked there for four years.
Wherry cofounded Meebo with college friends Seth Sternberg and Sandy Jen in 2005. All were in their twenties. They used Wherry's Palo Alto apartment as their programming hub. The origin of the name Meebo came from ideas the three scribbled on napkins in a pizza restaurant. Wherry and her cofounders wanted a two-syllable name that began with M. They plugged different names into browsers to see what was available. Meebo struck them as catchy and humorous.
Wherry developed Meebo's initial JavaScript framework in 2004, before cofounding Meebo. She was integral in creating products such as Meebo Messenger, Meebo Mobile, and the Meebo Bar, and she would lead Meebo's web, product management, and user experience teams; she designed the look and feel of all Meebo's products.
Although Meebo was not the first instant-messaging (IM) service, it was the first one to combine online chat services effectively to allow users to access any IM platform without needing to download and run multiple software products. This allowed users around the world to connect easily and quickly, because they could access their screen name and communicate via IM from anywhere and from any computer just by going to a single webpage. Users could instant-message via Meebo regardless of whether they had AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, MSN Messenger, and/or an ICQ account.
Meebo was also innovative in web design in that it allowed users to send and receive messages without its interfering with the page display and behavior. Meebo also became quickly popular because it bypassed college campus and workplace IM restrictions on their servers, providing the platform to continue chatting. Thus, some people viewed it as a nuisance. Meebo is enabled by the messenger-engineering software Ajax, which provides users with a software-like experience within a web browser.
Wherry describes Meebo as a baroque balancing act between two very different worlds: an application displayed in a web document–viewing medium and a metaphor of a software dialogue. Wherry draws a parallel between the way classical music developed and the way web applications have evolved today. She uses the example of classical Baroque harpischord music, arguing that the progression of classical music can guide webmasters to a subtler web design, without overwhelming audiences with lots of notes and ornamentation. Like classical music, Wherry argues that web design should utilize concrete and specific devices via subtle, simple experimentation. By way of comparison, Wherry points out that mash-ups inundate users with a mess of often disharmonious data culled from different websites, making navigation and comprehension difficult.
Meebo received $3.5 million from venture capitalist firms such as Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 2005 and $25 million in financing from Jafco Ventures, KTB Ventures, and Time Warner Investments in 2008 (the latter an investment arm of Time Warner, Inc.). By 2008, Meebo had 29 million users sending more than 150 million messages daily. Meebo was named one of the Hottest Silicon Valley Companies by Lead411 in 2010. In 2011, Meebo announced that it had reached 250 million monthly global visitors. In 2012, Google bought Meebo for an undisclosed sum speculated to be $100 million.
Wherry cofounded Edelweiss Ventures LLC, a venture fund, with Lee Jacobs, Brian Balfour, and Todd Masonis. She worked for a time in her husband's company, Dandelion Chocolate, in San Francisco. She also began writing.
Personal Life
Wherry met her husband, Todd Masonis, at Stanford. They live in San Francisco, California, and enjoy biking, cooking, and traveling. Wherry also enjoys reading. When she's not coding, she blogs about the art of design. Wherry has said that a background in computer sciences may have made her more comfortable in male-dominated and technical environments, but she looks forward to the day when women technological entrepreneurs will come as no surprise.
Wherry is a classically trained violinist and draws parallels between the refined austerity of classical music and the evolution of web design. She says that webpages succeed in attracting users when their use of design is subtle.
In 2009, Wherry was a recipient of the Founders Fund Tech Fellows Award in Engineering Leadership.
Bibliography
"About." Elaine Wherry's Blog, elainewherry.com/about-2/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.
Bedwell, Linda. “Making Chat Widgets Work for Online Reference.” Online 33.3 (2009): 20–23. Print.
Buckman, Rebecca, and Mylene Mangalindan. “Financing Round Values Meebo at $300 Million.” Wall Street Journal 1 May 2008: C3. Print.
Geron, Tomio. “Google Buying Social Toolbar Company Meebo, Team Joins Google+.” Forbes June 2012: 31. Print.
Risdahl, Aliza Pilar Sherman. Entrepreneur 35.8 (2006): 32. Print.
Wherry, Elaine. What Web Application Design Can Learn from the Harpsichord. 2 Feb. 2010. BayCHI Conversation Network. Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group of Computer Human Interaction. Web. 12 Aug. 2012.