Mobile: (415) 613-7229
Office: (650) 966-1404
Fax : (650) 967-2863
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Since 2002 I have been operating my own Consultancy company. My clients fall into two categories: Venture Capital Firms, or individual investors, and regular, or sometimes, startup companies.
I assist venture capital firms by performing in-depth technical due-diligence regarding potential investment targets. I investigate the technologies owned, and/or developed, dependency on other technologies used, and assess the protection and potential value of IP assets. I also take a look at the existing development team, its strengths and weaknesses, and interaction with other departments. If so requested, I also design forward looking plans for the development organization so that they can be built into well working, world class teams. These activities are both geared towards helping make assesments about investments or acquisitions, as well as towards helping companies in the current investment portfolio.
For my corporate clients a perform a variety of functions. Some of these overlap the elements mentioned above for venture captial firms. In these cases I often work more directly with the company's management in planning an strengthening the engineering organization and its processes (requirements, design, documentation, source management, release management, QA etc.). I also get asked to comment on existing architecture and use of technology, or design new approaches. Often times my clients have been growing, but are hitting some limitations in their ability to scale their efforts, products and team to a larger, more demanding environment, or to rapidly accomodate emerging needs. My very wide and deep technical experience allows me to operate very succesfully as a bridge between executive management and the more technically inclined folks, as well as operate at a deeply technical level to aid in, or implement, the actual solutions. I have acted purely as an advisor, VP of Engineering, and variations in between.
As you may see from my resume and personal bio, I have very extensive experience in many areas, and a proven ability to quickly enter a new field, assimilate and understand that environment, and start delivering results.
Former and current clients include:
Besides my extensive management experience and proven track record in the technical area, I have extensive experience in the following:
Developed software for automatically modifying database driven aeronautical maps.
After becoming the owner of the second Macintosh computer in Europe I took Apple's early developer classes. I learned the intracacies of Macintosh programming and Apple hired me as a consultant to redesign and provide developer training for the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg) and the General European area (which includes Iceland, and Israel as well).
SpinCircuit is a provider of web-based supply chain management for the electronics industry sector. It started as a development out of Cadence and was later spun off. During this period the company had the typical organizational and software architecture problems mentioned above. I was hired by the CEO and worked with engineering and marketing teams to analyze existing processes and create and recommend new approaches.
Certified Time was a company involved with the delivery of trusted time services. It worked with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to do so. I was heavily involved in taking the early startup company from concept to reality, designing and buildiing (with a small team) software and data centers in San Jose and Tokyo. I helped recruit the core team of engineers.
Comprendo LLC attempts transform US health care by harnessing the purchasing power of health-conscious consumers. Comprendo worked with MD Health Evolution (another of my customers) to create a very succesful health and lifestyle improvement web site for emplotyees of Target in Minnesota. Specifically for this customer I maintained and configured a Drupal based site (created by another developer) and interfaced it with the MD Health Evolution application using secure Web services. Advised the CEO of Comprendo on strategic engineering/business issues.
Garage Ventures LLC asked me to partner up with the founder of Netfreight to take the company from a potentially fundable idea, to the next stage. I worked with the founder to create a business plan, technical architecture and a overall presentation for Venture Capital Firms. After several presentations to the VC community we obtained funding and I joined as VP of engineering. I built a small engineering team and launched an initial version of the product. The company had many challenges, not the least of which was the bursting of the Internet bubble. It did not survive.
A former Cyntric colleague (Greg Steiner, then a consultant, now President of eHarmony.com) contacted me about a new startup he was involved with: eHarmony. It had founders, three junior engineers, and a proof of concept product implementation that was already starting to run into performance/scaling problems. As a consultant I helped grow and establish an engineering team, designed a distributed fail-safe matching architecture, and a new application architecture. These fundamentals remained in place over a period of 5-6 years as the company grew from a few thousand registered users to about 10 million. The operational infrastructure grew from just a few servers, to a large data center that I designed and built for eHarmony in 2005-2006 (10 rack, about 150 servers). The data center featured state of the art equipment, fully redundant, no single point of failure, setup with highly automated server management and repurposing.
Besides the work mentioned above, I was integrally involved with making sure that eHarmony remained a viable operation able to scale its inner workings with the ever growing size of its customer base. I also worked with the research department to integrate new matching methods and methodologies and design new front-end methods providing additional business opportunities. In addition, I designed an asynchronous continuous messaging system for consumer targeted email, working on vendor selection and working closely with the selected provider.
At two times I helped recruit a VP of engineering for eHarmony (in intervening periods I often acted as defacto VP), always acting as senior advisor to the VP of engineering. Around the time eHarmony recruited its third VP of engineering (2008) my involvement became less necessary and ceased. The matching architecture I designed partially survives, but has now been supplanted/augmented with a Hadoop/Cloud based approach. I reported to Greg Steiner, current COO and president.
Vipin Ahuja, CEO writes: "We were in the process of developing our FPGA design software tool, and it had an architectural issue that had been lingering for some time. We needed an architectural expert who could lead us in the right direction, so I turned to Dolf since I had known him earlier. Dolf is very professional and it shows clearly in his work. He accomodated my request on a short notice, brought forward a clear and methodical approach and delivered well documented proposal."
I worked with Mark Wiliams (former CEO of Certified Time) who became CEO of a startup in an interesting new space: 3D Earth vizualtion for real-estate and tourism applications. I worked with Mark and the founders to define a strategy and business approach as well as technical architecture and approach. I helped put together a presentation for the Venture Capital Community and represented GeoData on several occasions for such presentations as acting VP of engineering. The company obtained funding. I worked to pull a prototype implementation in Cold Fusion into a production ready state (to get the company going and start a revnue stream), and designed the next generation architecture.
Ice House is a portfolio company of Pacific Technology Partners. I assist them with various management issues, helping build the company, as well as work on specific projects with customers. The latter typically in the role of architect.
MD Health Evolution had a web application for the lifestyle/health educational program, but Dr. Traver wanted new functionality. The web site, a result of a succession of low quality programming consultants, was fragile and inflexible. I completely re-implented the PHP based web site using a modern, tiered approach. I then added an extensive set of Web services to enable cooperation with third party sites. See also Comprendo LLC. On behalf of MD Helath EVolution I worked with third party partners such as Google, Palo Alto Medical Foundation, and Target Inc. to integrate applications.
Developed a source code library for the Macintosh allowing the creation of applications needed VT100 terminal compatible console windows.
Architecture and scalability of "Star Trek" mobile apps for iOS and Android released in early 2013 in support of the new Star Trek movie. With Signature Creative and Ice House.
Designe, architectedd and implemented backend systems for Ringz.tv mobile application. Managed mobile application engineers. Ringz is a fun, fast way to explore thousands of online entertainment options. It’s easy to pick favorites, make collections, search, swipe, and tap to watch shows, clips, see your friends’ Likes and share your own.
Due diligence research on potential investments.
Strongmail provides online marketing solution for email and social media. Worked for the CEO to assess the firm's software architecture and engineering processes, and to design some solutions for new challenges. Also worked with StrongMail to design an addition to their architecture that will allow for on demand, triggered emails to customers (i.e. non-compaign based emails).
Takumi provides software products to silicon design forms and foundries. The software centers around development tools to optimize layout for yield and performance. I helped the VP of engineering organize his growing development team and worked with engineers to solve architecural issues. I also implemented image processing software for automatic visual defect detection and mapping to layout coordinates.
When then TLC (now Broderbund) acquired the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing product they need a full architectural investigation and documentation, which I provided.
After their initial young startup phase I worked with the founders of Trulia on technical team build-out, and platform architecture. Helped them recruit their VP of engineering.
Did some small engineering projects.
Copyright © 1998-2010 Dolf
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Page last updated:
Saturday, February 17, 2018