email: wm
leler.com
email: wmleler.com
I have strong experience in both the technical and business side of companies — from senior management and fundraising, through research and development, to marketing and evangelism — at both start-ups and large organizations. I love a good challenge, and working with a great team.
I am always looking for leadership roles where I can use all my technical, management, and communication skills. I enjoy creating and growing innovative organizations that can take raw ideas, identify marketplaces, and create successful products. And have fun doing it.
Starting a new company (also named ZAT). February 2006 to present. Building a Web 2.0 application for travel planning and trip sharing, using Google Maps, JavaScript, AJAX, and all the other relevant buzzwords.
Contrary Capital, LLC. Portland, Oregon. January 2002 to present. Founder and President of a consulting company that helps emerging businesses refine their business model, obtain funding, and grow. Entrepreneur in Residence for the Open Technology Business Center, an incubator for technology start-ups.
Banff Centre for the Arts. Banff, Alberta, Canada. June 1996 to present and September 1990 to May 1991. Staff, Consultant, Advisor. Helped define major programs on virtual reality and interactive web content for one of the most prestegious art institutions in the world. Worked with artists, wrote proposals, defined program directions. Collaborations with companies including Apple, RealWorld, Microsoft, Interval Research, Silicon Graphics, and dozens of others. In 2007 I was named a Banff Centre Fellow.
The eMarket Group. Portland, Oregon. December 2001 to February 2006. CEO and member of Board of Directors for multi-million dollar e-commerce company. Company handled all aspects of e-commerce and merchandising for large media clients, including HBO, Sony, Amazon, Paramount, Tribune Media, and many others. Raised money, reorganized company, brought in major new contracts. Company was recognized by Internet Retailer magazine as one of the Top 300 Retail Web Sites, and the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing private companies.
DigiSlice, Inc. Portland, Oregon. July 2002 to March 2004. CTO of a company that sold component-based enterprise applications.
Zat, Inc. Portland, Oregon. August 1996 to March 2001. Founder, President, and CTO of a company that developed and sold solutions for component-based distributed-application assembly. Formed company, built management team, acquired funding, assembled technical advisory board containing industry luminaries (Andy van Dam, Adele Goldberg), designed and built web site, managed employees, performed marketing and sales duties. Product was awarded "Programming Tool of the Year" at the Web '99 conference. In June, 2000, Zat was acquired in a deal valued in the mid 8 figure range, which I negotiated.
Ithaca Software / Autodesk. Alameda, California. May 1991 to May 1996. Recruited by Carl Bass to join startup company to define future products. Technical lead and chief designer on project to define and build tools for developing distributed applications. Wrote successful book on company's flagship product. Company was acquired by Autodesk. Carl is now CEO of Autodesk.
The Instruction Set, London, England, and Instantiations, Portland, Oregon. 1989 to 1991. Wrote and presented courses internationally on object-oriented design, C++, and object-oriented databases.
Cogent Research. Portland, Oregon. 1988 to 1990. Built and managed graphics group for startup company. Company created a line of distributed graphics computers, including hardware and software. Designed the underlying parallel technology for, and was part of the team that developed a distributed version of the UNIX operating system, including a distributed window system and user interface.
University of Manchester. Manchester, England. 1988 to 1989. Honorary Research Fellow. Performed research on distributed software and hardware, supervised students.
Oregon Graduate Institute. Portland, Oregon. 1985 to 1988. Taught graduate-level courses on computer graphics and parallel programming.
Tektronix. Portland, Oregon. 1983 to 1988. Member of Technical Staff in Computer Research Lab. Research and development work on constraint languages and user interfaces.
Texas Instruments. Houston, Texas. 1977 to 1980. Led graphics group in Geophysical Services Division. Assembled and managed the team that developed the world's first interactive 3D graphics workstation for seismic interpretation. This pioneering product set the standard that is now the dominant technology used for oil exploration, a multi-billion dollar market.
Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Emphasis on computer languages, distributed processing, and computer graphics. 4.0 GPA. Research and teaching assistant for Fred Brooks, who was also on my thesis committee.
Graduate-level courses at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Oregon Graduate Institute.
B.A. in Electrical Engineering from Rice University, with emphasis on computer hardware.
B.A. in Fine Arts from Rice University, with emphasis on film making, photography, and computer graphics.
Proposed and presented session at JavaOne conference on application assembly.
Member of GAF (Graphics Application Framework), a cross-industry working group assembled by Andries van Dam (Brown University) and Salim Abbi-Ezzi (Microsoft and Sun Microsystems) to design the next standard for object-oriented frameworks for computer graphics.
Taught course at SIGGRAPH (international computer graphics conference) on distributed computer graphics.
Independently designed, implemented, and distributed Bertrand, the first constraint programming language.
Program committee for Eurographics conference on object-oriented graphics.
Course reviewer for SIGGRAPH.
Resident of Leighton Artist Colony, Banff Centre for the Arts, summer 1986.
3D with HOOPS. Book published by Addison-Wesley in 1996, on how to write 3D computer graphics applications.
Chapter in book Object-oriented Programming for Graphics, published by Springer-Verlag in 1995.
Linda Meets UNIX. Paper published in IEEE Computer Magazine in 1990 on a distributed version of the UNIX operating system and its user interface.
Constraint Programming Languages. Book published by Addison-Wesley in 1988. This was the first book published on constraint languages. Constraint systems are now heavily used in such diverse markets as computer-aided design (CAD) and commodities trading.
Paper presented at SIGGRAPH 1980 on human vision and anti-aliasing.
Dozens of papers presented at conferences on distributed computing, virtual reality, computer languages, and object-oriented graphics.
Travel, Photography, Music, Dance, Politics.