John David Olsen is co-founder and CEO of Liforia, Inc. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, John attended the University of Washington in Seattle. After holding several post-college sales and marketing positions, John landed a job at Microsoft in 1991, ending up as a product manager in the IT group several years later. After leaving Microsoft, John went into consulting and worked on projects for clients such as Proxima and the Walt Disney Internet Group.

John  has always had a passion for finding “what’s next - what's on the technological horizon?”

Ending up in Seattle in the 1980’s, after having exited (the polite way of saying dropped out) of the University of Washington; John realized that the revolutionary idea of mobile phones was going to change the way the world communicates. Envisioning this future of the connected world, John went to seek out the “best brand” in the business, and took his first commission-only sales job at Cellular One.

Having had this and several other entry-level sales and marketing jobs led John to doing some marketing consulting for a friend. The project was going to require a computer, “and I was going to buy a Macintosh,” John says. “Being rather parsimonious (in other words ‘cheap’) I was looking for alternatives to buying one myself,” he continued. After discussing this with a friend who was just starting his career at Microsoft, he was loaned a PC, running Word and Excel on Windows 3.0. John recalls asking forthrightly, “What's Windows?” It was 1990 and after John started using this borrowed PC, he recognized immediately that the PC revolution was on the verge of exploding and it was literally going to change the world – revolutionizing the way people work, socialize, and communicate.

“I absolutely knew that I had to work for Microsoft. I just kept telling everyone I knew how amazing this Windows stuff was and how it was going to change the world,” recalls John. After six month of interviews, trying and failing to secure several different positions, finally, he landed a job supporting the Microsoft sales force. Microsoft had about 4000 employees at the time, and John was hired for his (albeit brief) sales and marketing background. His first job was to design a system to track Microsoft’s early networking products, in order for that the salespeople could get paid on commission. (These were SQL Server and LAN Manager for the geeks out there.) Eventually, this led to a Product Manager position in the IT group, which took him to live in Paris, supporting the European sales force in 1995-96.

“I remember being at my parent’s ranch in Idaho in about 1995 demonstrating to them how you could dial up to one of the old text-based bulletin board systems using MSN as an ISP. I was trying to show them how we were going to change the world with this type of connectivity. “’It’s going to be amazing!’ I told them,” John recalls, “Blank stares was all I got until my step-father looked at the screen and finally said, ‘Well, that not very interesting.’”

Upon his return to the US and somewhat burned-out from the intensity of the experience, John said simply, “It was my time to go.” 1997 was a year of reflection and world-wide travel on year-long sabbatical. “I was going to take a year, but I made it eight months before in had to get my brain reengaged,” John recalls. This decision led to an independent consulting job at the Disney Internet Group, which was initially to be a 3-4 week consulting engagement. John’s level of expertise at this point put him into the role of leading a team of eight, managing the Y2K project for all of Disney’s Internet companies world-wide.

Envisioning the imminent explosion of the Internet bubble in 2000, John decided to embark upon something else that he’s always been interested in, real estate - ending up at Sotheby’s International Realty. “This was a great ‘Plan B’ until getting back to tech and it’s been a great way to fund Liforia,” John says.

“The original inspiration for Liforia was born and then evolved from some ideas I had while I was on my sabbatical in 1997,” John recounts. He continued, “I've always been fascinated by synchronicity and when we have the ability to log and connect events together in Liforia, we’re going to see some amazing patterns emerge.”

Finding a keen interest in spirituality, mysticism, and quantum physics during his sabbatical, John immersed himself, as he's done time and time again following in his passions. He spent time reading and absorbing everything from the contemporary guru’s Deepak Chopra and Wayne Dyer, to the ancient Gnostic Gospels, the history of the Pythagorean School, and Bhagavad Gita.

“Social networking is the next great wave of our technological evolution. It’s time for technology and spirituality to merge,” says John, “and social networking is the place it’s going to happen.”

John co-founded Liforia with Staas Yudenko in 2007, and as CEO and CTO respectively. Brought together in a perfect moment of synchronicity, they have teamed up to “change the world.”