The smartest guy in the room. When I joined Amazon Bezos drove to work in a used Honda Accord. Then he upgraded to a Volvo station wagon. Now he owns spaceships and a fleet of Boeing 767s. At the time of this photo in the Seattle DC, New Year's Eve 1999, he just became TIME's Person of The Year. He and I made the same salary, but he had more stock options. www.amazon.com
Work Summary:CLICK IDFT equation for my work summary. For an IDFT explanation see http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/mdft/. In addtion to digital music, IDFT can describe the PAM-5 encoding scheme for the IEEE Gigabit ethernet standard.
World Market: Bed, Bath and Beyond closed its doors on July 30, 2023. Another Amazon tab, another brick-and-mortar retail chain ist kaput. But before that happened, we folks at World Market, as we're now known, saw it coming, and separated in a real hurry before Bed Bath took us down with it. It's a huge undertaking separating a multi-million dollar company from a multi-billion dollar company and doing it under a legal deadline.
Brick & mortar retail stores are struggling. Sears, JC Penney, Macys, ToysRUs and Radio Shack are out of business. Seeing Amazon's effect on Bedbath is mind-blowing. As Bezos has said about the book business, "Amazon isn't happening to the book business, the future is happening to book business." Substitute "book business" with "retail" and you get the picture.
Costplus/Worldmarket: bought by Bed, Bath and Beyond in 2012. It was
profitable in 2008 in the middle the economic crisis, a sign of a truly smart company.
My own company: my one client, the California Nurses Assoc. is one of the most powerful unions in the country.
MadMen: Parent company IAC bought Ask when search was going to be big money, big ad money for Google. Owner Barry Diller has tried in vain to sell Ask. Purchased for $1.85 Billion in 2005, Wall Street says he'll be lucky to get $1 Billion. Ask shutdown its search operations in 2010. Ouch. Talk about being "googled!"
Viewstar: Now called Global360, they were a customer of mine when I was at Gold Hill. Small world, ehh? They were known as Viewstar then. Great place to work. Bought by a private equity company in Dallas. Soon to be hollowed out and sold.
Brain "transplant," not surgery: Replaced entire Cisco infrastructure in 14 AAU sites in 6 months to support VoIP, including recabling the HQ,... without downtime; figure that one out - teamwork. Installed 1000-user WLAN in 3 months after. 1200 emps. 2004-2007.
Startup #6: Rube Goldberg in cyberspace. I was the only person who could and did shut down and restart 1/4 of Amazon's operations, without a hitch, from memory, with just a cellphone. "Get big fast" was the motto. But "get rich fast' was the real motto, an understatement for many of Amazon's 1800 emps. in 1999. 1999-2001. Amazon is fast approaching $1 trillion market value, and Bezos is the richest man in modern history. As Bezos likes to say "AHAHAHAHA!."
Hello central or rather, hello HLR: An SBC company, but felt like a CLEC. Lots of creative freedom and fun on the engineering side. Merged with Southern Bell. 1400 emps 1997-1999.
Startup #5: Internet pioneer. One of the first to approach banks with web-based account management, letter-of-credit, HR, online retail, and intranet systems. At the time we thought Amazon was small potatoes. 6 emps. 1996-1997 OOB
Voice of Boston's leftist college community: The Boston Phoenix was the first alternative weekly newspaper to post its entire contents on the web. We made it happen Nov. 5, 1995, and won national recognition. 400 emps. 1995-1997
MIT startup #4: Listening devices for the US intelligence community and CDPD base stations for cellular companies. Think SMS. Company was sold to Tellabs. 1993-1995 120 emps. OOB.
MIT startup #3:MOTU is one of the original MIDI music software companies. My claim to fame: assisting Barry Manilow's engineer on Barry's US Tour. You can bet I was honored. NOT!!! 1992-1992 25 emps.
Hate spelling and grammar?:HMCo Software for checking your grammar and spelling errors was embedded in MS Word. Division was sold to INSO. 1990-1991 90 emps. OOB.
MIT startup #2: Led by Simson Garfinkel, triple major from MIT not inclusive of his special talents in CompSci. If the Hubble Space Telescope mirrors hadn't failed I wouldn't be writing this. 1988-1990 10 emps. OOB
MIT startup #1: "Artifical Intelligence on PCs." LISP. The high-flying 1980s equivalent of the dot-com bust; the entire industry vanished in a few months. Two of the best programmers in the US left Gold Hill and went to Borland and then Microsoft. 140 emps. 1986-1988 OOB
Only geeks know about this company: A very small division within a huge Japanese conglomerate trading company called ItohChu. Makers of high-quality DEC VT100 knockoffs. 35 emps 1985-1986 OOB