Who We Are
Shankar Desai
Co-Founder, Naked Apartments
Naked Apartments was founded in June of 2008 by Shankar Desai and Peter Treadway, two friends who met on the recess fields of Butler House in 6th grade and decided then that they wanted to improve the New York City rental experience. Naked Apartments gives them good reason to continue hanging out and continue the banter that started back in the day.
Shankar is the CEO, having spent countless hours over the last 12 months researching the New York City market, interviewing and hiring the team, and building out the website
Peter Treadway
Co-Founder, Naked Apartments
Peter has been less hands on but remains intimately involved in the planning of the site and its direction while at the same time keeping his day job.
Gabe Friedman
Lead Designer
As philosophy major with dubious career prospects, Gabriel Friedman encountered the world wide web in 1993, while working as a presentation designer at Salomon Smith Barney, part of Citigroup, the banking giant with similarly dubious career prospects. After designing the first generation of the SSB web site, Gabriel left the company in 1998 to open a one-man studio, where he’s enjoyed working with some of the world’s great brands, including Sesame Street, Dilbert, Star Trek, Nature Conservancy, IFC, and Criterion.
Gabriel is temperamentally devoted to clean lines and simple layouts. While this often results in clean designs with simple layouts, it also means he sometimes finds himself re-arranging messy product displays in delis. Pro bono.
He lives in Brooklyn with his girlfriend and the occasional cat.
Jay Signorello
Lead Developer
Jay is responsible for Naked Apartments software engineering and operations. He brings over eight years of development experience to Naked Apartments. In one of his previous roles, Jay was Lead Engineer at Heavy.com where he helped lead the development of a video ad network dubbed Husky Media, which received over 19 million unique users and generated over $100k in revenue in the first 60 days. He also served as Director of Software Development at Pepperjam, a renowned full service Internet marketing firm.
During his time at Pepperjam, Jay helped to architect and build an affiliate ad network, which gained 17.5% market share during it’s initial launch and was said to be the most significant affiliate network launch of the last ten years. Earlier in his career, Jay owned and operated a web development firm in Pennsylvania. Jay holds a BS in Information Technology from Penn State University. During his personal time, he enjoys building useful web apps, biking, fishing, watching movies, woodcrafting, and most of all good food. He resides in Northern NJ with his wife, Serina.
