Jeff Goodwin with Taking Chances

Jeff Goodwin was a business major who also took CES classes as electives for fun at the U of Washington.  He lives on Fox Island with his wife.  He has worked for Boeing while taking night classes when he learned the language FORTRAN.  He contracted work with IBM doing image processing and image recognition using 8086 Assembly language.  At this time he decided to make his own software.  He had a great idea but when he submitted it to IBM he got no backing and someone else ended up producing his idea.  Jeff created a service provider business that turned into a product business after getting the proper revenue and resources.  He started by building device drivers with IBM now as his customer.  He bootstrapped the company in this way.

                Jeff next went to Austin to the OEM Company creating software to bridge new hardware with real time operating systems.  He needed to raise money through angel investors and he had heavy competitors in this market.  At this time he partnered with another company who became their client.  He had to make a choice to either become a bigger company or branch out by making a move towards open source so he chose a third path which was to sell the company as his exit plan.

                Through SWAT analysis helped him make his decision and so he really sold his Intellectual Property.  He sold to cisco not because they were the highest bidder but because he thought it was the right thing to do for the people who worked for him.  He wouldn’t leave their building until a deal was struck.  The hardest lesson he said was to “know when to sell you company.”