Steve Yen is a co-founder and the VP Technology at Escalate.  Did KIVA too.

Language Mining Thesis: for a rich vein of powerful language ideas, just seek out Lisp / CommonLisp.  Ideas found there originally from the 1960's and 1980's have yet to be brought to popular light.

Current excitement: learning that JavaScript is actually Lisp with a Java syntax.
	* DouglasCrockford - http://www.crockford.com/javascript/javascript.html