Steve Souders

Steve Souders works at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!. As part of his work, Steve has developed a set of best practices for making web sites faster. His book, High Performance Web Sites, explains these best practices along with the research and hands-on results that went into them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug. He was named a 2007 Yahoo! Superstar.

Steve has been at Yahoo! since 2000 working on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo!. Prior to Yahoo! Steve worked at several small to mid-sized startups including two companies he co-founded, Helix Systems and CoolSync. He also worked at General Magic, WhoWhere?, and Lycos. In the early 80's Steve caught the artificial intelligence bug and worked at a few companies doing research on machine learning including several publications and conference appearances. He received a BS in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia and a MS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.

Steve's interests are varied:

• He sits on the board of Freehand Systems and Fremont Hills Country Club.
• He teaches Sunday School at First Lutheran Church in Palo Alto.
• He's played basketball with several NBA and WNBA players.
• He was a member of the Universal Studios Internet Task Force.
• He participated in setting a Guinness world record.
• He rebuilt a 90-year-old carriage house.
• He has a wonderful wife and three daughters.