Four decades of building products — from the early days of desktop publishing, through iMovie and iPhoto at Apple, to a long line of startups. Here’s the path, newest first.
Founded Beluga to build autonomous navigation technology for self-driving vehicles and maritime vessels — systems that reason about the world in real time rather than just following a map.
Built inventory and manufacturing software that understands how things are actually made — tracking every component, subassembly, and finished good on the factory floor.
Launched ZIPit.social, a hyper-local social network organized by ZIP code, alongside ZIPit.email for affordable local email marketing.
Relocated to Milwaukee and began building ventures in the Midwest tech scene — bringing a Silicon Valley product mindset to a new city.
Distilled decades of shipping real products into the Concentric Method — a product-development methodology designed to deliver quality software on time, as an alternative to Agile.
Built small apps to scratch personal itches — GSDList, a to-do app that treats your list as a searchable database of everything you might ever want to do, plus Clockwise and Step Brother.
Founded Marathon to build a smart, internet-connected washer-dryer, pairing deep software experience with manufacturing — on the conviction that the physical world holds far more unsolved problems than the digital one.
Brought a Silicon Valley product-development lens to Ford, working on innovation initiatives inside a global manufacturer.
Founded Five Across, building group-based messaging years before social media went mainstream. Venture-backed and acquired by Cisco, returning more than 20× to its investors.
Created iPhoto, carrying the consumer-media idea from video to photos, and led the iApps group — iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD — that became Apple’s “digital hub.”
Created iMovie 1.0 from scratch — a three-person team in nine months, with Steve Jobs as product manager. Apple launched it with Jeff Goldblum television ads, the first time a Mac app was marketed on TV.
The story of the medal Steve Jobs made me →Returned to Adobe as an engineer and helped ship Adobe Illustrator 5.5 and 6.0.
Founded RightBrain to build apps for the NeXT platform, including PasteUp — a page-layout program built on a novel, object-oriented, word-based text engine.
Cold-emailed Steve Jobs to land a job at NeXT, where — as product manager for “Interpersonal Computing” — he built fax directly into the operating system.
Joined Adobe as employee #40 in font technology, shipping Adobe’s first downloadable fonts and writing the definitive book on programming PostScript — still in print decades later. His application was a working PostScript program.
Earned a BA in Computer Science. A college calligraphy class sparked a fascination with typography that led, almost by accident, to a first job at Adobe.