About Us

Tunnel X, based in Brooklyn, New York, was founded by a couple of industry veterans who feel that everyone doesn't want to be social online all the time. Sometimes we want just the opposite: a private space to have a secure conversation.


The Team

Eric Liftin, Founder and CEO, has been designing for the web since that became an occupation and was Interface Architect for web pioneer Firefly. In 1998 he worked with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard as it was being created and was among its first fellows. Eric is an architect. Since 1997 he has run MESH Architectures (mesh-arc.com), an interdisciplinary practice that designs both physical architecture and web sites. In 2009 he spun off MESH's web development activities into the company 10x (10x.net) and has designed and built complex web sites like food52.com (a crowd-sourced recipe site). He has lived in New York City since 1990 and resides in Brooklyn with his wife, Elizabeth Schmidt, and two children. Eric received an M.Arch from Columbia and a BA in literature from Yale.

Eric's early work at Firefly was on making the web more social, using collaborative filtering and other technology Firefly developed to build community platforms. (In fact, in 1996 he tried to pitch Firefly's technology to Harvard, to help pair off roommates, but Harvard's response was that they couldn't imagine why that would be useful.) After the recent explosion in social media, in 2010 Eric noticed that nobody was providing the opposite: a place for a private, one-to-one conversation. That observation led to Tunnel X. Find Eric on Twitter @liftin.


Steve Schneider, Founder and CTO, has been building large-scale commercial web applications since 1995. Most recently, as CTO and EVP of Product Development at India-focused commerce site Squarekey.com, he was responsible for all things technical, as well as for devising technological solutions to the company's business needs. Prior to joining Squarekey, Steve was CTO at MyNines, the first aggregator of private-sale sites. Before that, he was a Senior Technical Manager at AOL, having landed there after AOL's acquisition of Quigo Technologies, where he was a Team Leader for the AdSonar platform. Before joining Quigo he was a senior developer at Major League Baseball. He has worked for companies and clients from Razorfish to Carnegie Hall; from BMW Motorcycles to Pfizer Pharmaceuticals; from Guardian Life Insurance to Warner Music Group to NBC to luxury-goods giant Richemont to TabletHotels.com, where he was a member of the start-up team.

He graduated from New York University in 1990 and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Persephone Harrington. Find Steve on Twitter @scschneid.


Board of Advisors

Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, has taught at Harvard Law School since 1968 and was voted the best professor by the graduating class of 2000. A much sought-after appellate advocate as well as a distinguished academic, Tribe has prevailed in three-fifths of the many appellate cases he has argued (including 35 in the U.S. Supreme Court). The title "University Professor," which Tribe has held since 2004, is Harvard's highest academic honor.

Tribe was appointed in 2010 by President Obama and Attorney General Holder to serve as the first Senior Counselor for Access to Justice. He taught law to President Obama, as well as Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kagan. He has written 115 books and articles, including his treatise, American Constitutional Law, cited more than any other legal text since 1950. The Northwestern Law Review opined that no-one else "in American history has... simultaneously achieved Tribe's preeminence... as a practitioner and... scholar of constitutional law." Born in China in October 1941 to Russian Jewish parents, Tribe entered Harvard at 16; graduated with a summa cum laude in Mathematics (1962) and a magna cum laude in Law (1966); received tenure at 30; helped write the constitutions of South Africa, the Czech Republic, and the Marshall Islands; has received eleven honorary degrees; and in 2013 was awarded the Henry M. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence by the American Philosophical Society, which has bestowed that award just twenty-five times since 1888.


Steven Johnson is one of the foremost thinkers on the social significance of technological change. He is host and co-creator of the forthcoming PBS series How We Got To Now. He is the bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From, The Seven Patterns of Innovation, The Innovator's Cookbook, which he edited, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good For You, and others. A practitioner as well as a theoretician, he has co-created three influential sites: the pioneering online magazine FEED, the Webby Award-winning community site Plastic.com, and the hyperlocal media site Outside.in, which was acquired by AOL in 2011. He is a contributing editor to Wired magazine and has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and many other periodicals. He's appeared on many high-profile television programs, including The Charlie Rose Show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.


Nick Grouf is the Managing Director of Firefly Holdings Ltd. He is a former Co-Founder, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer of privately-held Spot Runner, Inc., a technology company that is developing the next generation of advertising services. Grouf and longtime business partner, David Waxman, have successfully built and sold two prior companies, PeoplePC and Firefly Network, both of which focused on harnessing the democratizing power of the Internet. Grouf formerly served as Co - Founder, Chairman and CEO of PeoplePC, Inc., which was dedicated to simplifying the process of joining the online world. Prior to founding PeoplePC, Grouf served as a Venture Partner at Softbank Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm based in San Jose, California. Grouf was also the Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Firefly Network, Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft in 1998. Its core product, the Firefly Passport, became the foundation for Microsoft's Passport and .NET initiatives. While at Firefly, Grouf was also a Co-Founder and Director of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and a Co-Founder of TrustE. Grouf spent his early career with McKinsey & Co. A native New Yorker, Grouf holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a B.A. from Yale.