Square announced that Anna Patterson, founder and managing partner of Google’s Gradient Ventures and a vice president of engineering, has joined its board of directors.
Previously, Patterson helped launch Google Play, the world’s largest digital goods marketplace, and led a team that scaled up its infrastructure to serve more than a billion phones. She was the principal architect and inventor of TeraGoogle, the company’s search-serving system, and she helped lead search ranking efforts to determine top results prior to Google’s IPO.
Patterson’s other experience includes cofounding Cuil, a clustering-based search engine, and writing Recall.archive.org, the first keyword-based search engine and the largest Internet archive index. Prior to that, she was a cofounder of Xlift and co-creator of its search engine.
Patterson received her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She later became a research scientist in artificial intelligence at Stanford University, where she worked with one of the founders of AI, John McCarthy, and his wife, Carolyn Talcott.
“Square has long recognized the potential for artificial intelligence to help expand access to the economy and level the playing field for business owners,” said Patterson. “I was drawn to Square’s passion for making tools that foster inclusion, and I’m looking forward to contributing to this work.”
