if day: visionary, creative serial software entrepreneur focusing on usable software;
else: puzzle guy, photographer, pizza maker, gourmet cook, writer, blogger

Roy Leban is founder and CTO of Puzzazz, which is building the premier source for puzzles and puzzle games, with a goal of making sure that every solver has fun and gets challenged through high-quality puzzles and a great solving experience

A serial entrepreneur, Roy is a veteran of seven previous startup companies, including ones sold to Ashton-Tate, AT&T, and the Charter Fund. In the Seattle area, he spent five years at Microsoft, where he worked on Microsoft Access, Microsoft Office, and the bCentral web service.

An expert at building highly usable and highly scalable software and technology-based systems, Roy's experience and expertise encompass everything from user experience and user interface design to architecture, algorithms, and implementation. Roy has shipped more than twenty commercial products and services, including groundbreaking products in desktop productivity, word processing, tablet computers, web publishing, and educational software. He has provided user experience and development consulting services to a variety of companies, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small startup companies. Most of his consulting work focuses on user experience, where the breadth of his experience helps him to solve UI and UX problems quickly and efficiently, without requiring complete rewrites.

Roy serves as a mentor and advisor to a number of Seattle area entrepreneurs and startups. He holds monthly office hours at StartPad, where he provides free user experience consulting, mostly to startups, but also to the occasional established company. An avid supporter of the startup community, Roy is also the creator of SeattleTechCalendar, the shared, community-owned calendar for the Seattle tech community, and SeattleTechWiki, the The shared, community-owned wiki for the Seattle-area high-tech community. He has given talks about user experience at Microsoft, StartPad, Ignite Seattle, and the Hackers Conference.

Roy serves as an advisor to StartupWeekend and co-founded two StartupWeekend companies: FriendMosaic, an internet-based customized products company (sold to Mosaically Inc), and App and Seek, a iPhone and iPad game company.

Roy has three blogs: thisUser, about user experience, design, and usability, thisDev, about entrepreneurship and creating software, and thisTangent, a personal blog about everything else. The author of one computer book and one puzzle book, his puzzles have been published in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, GAMES Magazine, and elsewhere.

In his spare time, he is a photographer, gourmet pizza maker, and ambigrammist.. He lives in Redmond, Washington, with his wife, two kids, six computers, three Nikons, and a pizza oven.