John Borthwick works in the technology, communications and media space — as an entrepreneur, a builder and an investor — focused on the early stage.  His interests are in building great companies and understanding about how social media evolves.

Prior to launching betaworks John spent three and half years as Senior Vice-President of Technology and Alliances at Time Warner. In this role he worked with the executive team at Time Warner and the divisional CTO's to drive technology deals and strategy across the company. Before that he did technology and new product development work at AOL. He landed at AOL in early 1997 when they acquired the company he had started in 1994. The company they acquired was WP Studio that created a series of advertising supported web sites, including Total New York (one of the first local city guides), äda 'web (an art related site dedicated to Ada Byron Lovelace) and spanker (a pre-blog, daily journal of the occasionally twisted mind of Carter Adamson).

Companies with whom he has done early-stage investments include: Blogger, Fotolog, Return Path, Daylife, im in like with you,  Tumblr , Social Science, MyWebOS , Ideeli , Divmod and Lending Tree.  He also sits on the board and advises several companies, including New Journalist , Dabble and Coburn Ventures. For the most current list of betaworks projects visit the  betaworks site.