New top story from Time: Bharat Krish Joins TIME as Chief Technology Officer

TIME Editor in Chief and CEO Edward Felsenthal and President Keith A. Grossman sent the following note to staff Monday:

Team TIME,

We hope your week is off to a great start and that you and your loved ones continue to be healthy and safe. Tonight we are writing to share the exciting news that Bharat Krish will join TIME as Chief Technology Officer.

This is a moment when every company is working to accelerate its digital transformation, and Bharat is the ideal person to lead ours. He brings to TIME a powerful mix of entrepreneurial and corporate experience, spanning start-ups, as well as HBO and NBCU. Most recently, he was CTO of OTG Management, which provides technology at airports across North America. Prior to that he launched two start-ups, one in the video space that leveraged computer vision and deep learning to measure consumer engagement and one in the AI space for content creators. He has also served as CIO for HBO in Latin America, where he helped build and launch HBO GO’s streaming service, and held roles in technology at CNBC and GE. Throughout Bharat’s career he has focused not only on the excellence of products, but on people. He has been a champion of equality and inclusion in the field, working to train AI with a diverse dataset and speaking on against bias.

At TIME, we have made enormous progress building an audience of 100 million across our digital platforms, growing site traffic, video views, social, newsletters and TIME for Kids. We have also made significant improvements to our digital infrastructure. In addition to the homepage redesign that went live last week, you may have noticed a cleaner article page experience, the removal of many third-party ad-servers, and faster load times. Behind the scenes, there have been hundreds of other refinements to get us to this point. Much thanks to Burhan Hamid, Andrew Dwulet, Zach Lloyd, Monica Wood and their teams who have led this great work.

The opportunity in front of us is even greater, as we work to build deeper connections with our digital consumers, meet the constantly changing needs of marketers, and launch new products.

Since it will be awhile until we all meet again in person, Bharat asked that we share the following message:

“I loved reading TIME while growing up in India and Africa. It feels surreal to see my little ones enjoy TIME for Kids today. TIME is providing incredible value today to people of all ages across the world during this tough period. This is only possible because of an amazing team like yourself and the values you embody. I feel excited and honored to be joining you. I am also excited about our future growth coming from Digital. I look forward to working together to build a strong digital foundation for TIME.”

Bharat holds a Masters in Technology Management from Columbia University, an MS from Syracuse in Computer Engineering, a certificate from the University of Michigan in Applied Data Science and a degree in computer science and engineering from Coimbatore Institute of Technology. His volunteer work includes support for STEM in the public schools and mentoring via Techstars.

Bharat will report to Keith and work closely with all of us as we take our digital journalism and digital business to the next level.

Please join us in welcoming Bharat!