CastingWords Staff Bios
As a crowdsourced transcription service, CastingWords has thousands of transcribers, editors, and quality control workers available 24 / 7 to convert your audio and video recordings into transcripts and subtitle files.
Today we introduce the folks behind the scenes; our co-founders and staff members who keep it all running!
Nathan McFarland, Co-Founder
An alum of five hot startups and one government job, Nathan co-founded and bootstrapped CastingWords in 2005. 12 years later, CastingWords has become a major online transcription company with millions of minutes transcribed, and a crowdsourcing pioneer with its own crowd of high quality professional transcribers.
In his spare time, he’s building a bike park as part of the Board of the Grant County Economic Council.
Originally from Alaska, Nathan now lives in rural John Day, Oregon with his wife Raffaella, son Jasper, dog Woodrow, 3 sheep, an alpaca, and about a dozen chickens.
Rachel Pearson, Co-Founder
Rachel co-founded CastingWords with Nathan in 2005. Before CastingWords, she worked as a software engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Rachel does a little bit of everything at CastingWords; mostly software development, debugging, and bookkeeping.
She lives in Los Alamos, New Mexico with her husband, daughter, dog, and cat. When she’s not working, she likes to go hiking, camping, and skiing, and volunteer as a Girl Scout leader.
CastingWords Co-Founders, Nathan McFarland and Rachel Pearson
Michael Stone-Richard, Community Manager
Mike is a guitar player, retired cabinet maker, retired luthier (guitar building and repair), and an autodidactic with a love of words. At CastingWords, he handles customer and worker inquiries, billing matters, and is our go-to guy for audio issues.
Born and raised in Michigan, he’s resided in Wyoming, Arizona, California, Washington State, and Virginia, and is the father of CastingWords co-founder Rachel Pearson, and her sister, Brooke.
Mike and his wife, Deborah — a multimedia artist — live in a 500 square foot house on riverfront property in SE Michigan. On any given day they’re visited by a variety of wildlife: deer, coyotes, skunks, opossums, raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, bats, songbirds, woodpeckers, water fowl, waders, bald eagles, osprey, at least six species of hawks, and a feral kitty that has a squeaky little voice.
Jennifer Tucker, Community Coordinator
Our most recent addition, Jennifer joined CastingWords as a freelance transcriber in 2011, and became a regular employee on the support side in 2015.
She, along with Mike, handles support inquiries from both customers and workers. She also monitors the progress of orders, manages our workers’ forum and social media accounts, and keeps the support documentation up to date.
Originally from New York State, Jennifer went to a non-traditional college, studying in both Kenya and Costa Rica. She ended up settling in Costa Rica, where she remains to this day. She has a daughter in high school and one in college, a partner, and more cats than most people consider seemly. She loves animals, science fiction, and technology.
CastingWords Community Manager Mike Richard, and CastingWords Community Coordinator Jennifer Tucker