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Doug was born and raised in Westport, Connecticut. In 2005, Imbruce earned a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. During his time at Columbia, Imbruce created TheU, a popular "college tour" video series hosted by Chris Pratt and Sarah Drew, in association with The WB.
In early 2009, Imbruce developed the first prototype of Qwiki, a technology that produced rich-media from ordinary search results. Imbruce then presented the idea to multiple investors in Manhattan and met Bobby Yazdani, Qwiki’s seed investor. Yazdani advised Imbruce to move to Silicon Valley and introduced him to Louis Monier, the founder of AltaVista, the first all-Web search engine. Monier became the co-founder and CTO of Qwiki.
In September 2010, Monier and Imbruce launched Qwiki at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. On September 27, 2010, they were awarded the “Disrupt Cup”. Prior winners include David O. Sacks, the Founder of Yammer and Aaron Patzer, the Founder of Mint.com.
On October 22, 2010, Qwiki launched to the public. Later that year, Imbruce published an account of Qwiki's inception for Newsweek.Qwiki was acquired by Yahoo! on July 2, 2013 for a reported $50 million.
In 2021, Imbruce sold Podz to Spotify. Podz was a tech startup that was backed by the likes of Paris Hilton and Katie Couric.
After working at Yahoo! on a variety of mobile video applications, Imbruce became an active angel investor in transportation (Uber), defense, medical device and education companies.
He has appeared with Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and GroupMe cofounder Jared Hecht on panels discussing various aspects of the startup ecosystem, as well as being named as a "Top 100" NYC and San Francisco Bay Area startup founder.
