User:Tony.Wasserman
From StartupCamp
When I registered for Startup Camp, I designated myself as an Observer, a term that applies to all of us, but which doesn't actually say very much. So I thought that I would add a Profile.
These days, I am Director of the Software Management Program at Carnegie Mellon West in Mountain View, CA. I also started the Center for Open Source Investigation there, looking as issues in evaluation and adoption of open source software by organizations. That led to the creation of the Business Readiness Rating project. I'm also a Board member for a startup working on mobile testing.
Long ago (but not far away), I was a Professor at UC San Francisco (Medical Information Science) and also taught software engineering and operating systems at UC Berkeley during the years when BSD Unix was being developed. My group developed database and rapid prototyping tools, which we distributed under a BSD license in the early 1980's.
I then founded (and served as CEO) of Interactive Development Environments (IDE), which built the multi-user Software through Pictures modeling environment that ran on a heterogeneous network of Unix workstations, beginning with the original Sun-1 in 1984. We were one of Sun's first ISV's, and had a lot of technical "firsts", including running under X-Windows in 1986, and using an early release of the Network File System to share a project database on the network of workstations. We bootstrapped the company for almost five years, then raised a round of venture funding.
After IDE was merged with two other companies, I joined a [doomed to fail] dot-com startup in San Francisco, where we were among the first to deploy a J2EE B2C application. After consulting for a couple of other startups, I eventually went to Bluestone Software, where I started and ran their west coast product development group, making mobile devices work with our J2EE app server. We released an open source toolkit to enable others to build mobile applications. Bluestone met a sad fate when the senior execs sold it to HP, which killed it off as part of their middleware purge 19 months later. After that, I tried to create a new company based around mobile web services, but we were way too early with this idea, and VC's weren't funding anything in late 2002.
I then spent a year at a [still alive, but struggling] development tools startup before joining Carnegie Mellon West.
After more than 20 years of being around startups, it's definitely in my blood, though I have no immediate plans to do another one in the near future. However, I'm always open to advising entrepreneurs and startups, particularly those involved with open source, developer tools, SaaS, and mobile.
