About Us

Our Story

As the quantity of information on the Internet expands exponentially, it has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for search engines to provide all the relevant results on page one, while simultaneously eliminating those that are irrelevant. It is furthermore of little use providing millions, thousands or even hundreds of matched documents when few people bother expending the effort to dig past the first page of results.

To address these problems, Rank Dynamics has developed Dynamic Ranking, a real-time contextual search technology. By observing user behavior in order to disambiguate intent "on the fly," Rank Dynamics can automatically bring forward to page one relevant results that might otherwise have remain buried. By transforming traditional static lists of links into dynamic search pages where results are immediately re-ordered, users are able to more quickly and easily find pertinent information buried among the irrelevant results, significantly accelerating the search process.

The company, founded in 2006, is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Photo: Mark Cramer
Mark Cramer
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Mark Cramer, CEO, founded Rank Dynamics with the goal of transforming search from static lists of links into dynamic conversations in which the results move in response to real-time user signals. He has more than 20 years of technology industry experience, from engineer to executive, at companies including Hewlett-Packard in Grenoble, France and several start-ups in the Bay Area, such as Keynote Systems, NexTag and NetGeo, where he was CEO. Mark earned his BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT, where one of his projects included developing a search engine from scratch, and his MBA from Harvard Business School.


Founder and Chief Executive Officer

photo: Mike Wertheim
Mike Wertheim
Chief Architect

Mike Wertheim, Chief Architect, has over 20 years of experience in software development in both large corporate environments and small startups. Prior to building Rank Dynamic’s technology from the ground up, he gained expertise in software development by working with relational databases for nine years as an engineer at Sybase. Mike also spent three years working at Linkify as Chief Architect of an innovative, high-performance content management and project collaboration system. He contributed as a content reviewer on the book "Bitter EJB," published by Manning Publications in 2003. Mike has a BS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon.

Bryan Finkel

photo: Bryan Finkel
Bryan Finkel

Bryan Finkel, Managing Director of Greenwich Venture Management, has over 25 years of investment banking and operational consulting experience in the information technology and financial services sectors. Recent client engagements include the development of lead generation and call center analytics for a major student loan consolidator and the design of a multi-retailer loyalty incentive program for a $20 billion oil company. Prior to GVM, Bryan ran two venture funds for Advanta (NASDAQ: ADVNB), where he reported to the Office of the Chairman. Earlier in his career he was a Senior Associate at Broadview Associates where he participated in the valuation and sale of Iris Associates (creator of Lotus Notes!) and the venture round for Checkpoint Technologies (NASDAQ: CKPT). Prior to Broadview he founded a manufacturer of scientific computing products for movie special effects and communications. Bryan earned his MS and BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and his MBA from Stanford. He recently stepped down after ten years as Chairman of the MIT Enterprise Forum of NYC and continues to advise a wide variety of private companies.


Erik Freed

photo: Erik Freed
Eric Freed

Erik Freed has been active in the computer industry for over two decades, comfortably switching between multitudes of demanding roles. He has at various times been a hardware/software engineer, architect, consultant, writer, manager, executive, board member, spokesman, and founder. He is currently the principal at CoDecision, specializing in CTO level consulting to startups. Erik studied Math, Physics and Music at Yale University.


Dan Martin

photo: Dan Martin
Dan Martin

Dan Martin works with The Trust for Public Land as a project manager on the Sierra Team, where he purchases land from ranchers and timber companies to create or expand parks in the region. He is on the Campaign Committee for the Northern Sierra Partnership and is a Board Member of Sempervirens Fund. Prior to his work in land conservation, Dan served as Vice President of Business Development at HomeGain, Inc., where he led Online marketing efforts that brought approximately 5 million unique visitors per month to the company's website. Today Dan advises start-up companies in the software, Internet, energy efficiency, and real estate space on all phases of raising capital, marketing, and business development.


Sam Shank

photo: Sam Shank
Sam Shank

Sam Shank is the Co-founder and CEO of HotelTonight, the on-demand mobile hotel booking app. A travel-obsessed serial entrepreneur, Sam previously founded and was CEO of DealBase.com, a travel deals search engine, and was CEO of TravelPost.com, a hotel reviews site. SideStep acquired TravelPost.com and Sam stayed on as VP of business development until its fortunate acquisition by Kayak. Sam also worked in comparison shopping at Excite, CNET and NexTag. Sam attended the University of Virginia and received an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.


ChengXiang Zhai

photo: ChengXiang Zhai
ChengXiang Zhai

ChengXiang Zhai is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 1990 and another Ph.D. in Language and Information Technologies from Carnegie Mellon in 2002. His research interests include information retrieval, text mining, natural language processing, machine learning and bioinformatics, and he has published over 100 papers in major conferences and journals in these areas, including five award papers. He is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems and Information Processing and Management, and serves on the editorial board of the Information Retrieval Journal. He is a program co-chair of ACM CIKM 2004 , NAACL HLT 2007, and ACM SIGIR 2009. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and has received many awards, including the 2004 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the 2008 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2007 Microsoft Beyond Search - Semantic Computing and )nternet Economics Award, the 2009 IBM Faculty Award, the 2010 UIUC Rose Award for Teaching Excellence and the 2011 HP Innovation Research Award.