Ivan Gevirtz most recently served as Director of Engineering at Wireless Generation, an educational software company. There, he focused on building education data systems for cities, states, and large school districts. Ivan also managed the groups responsible for adaptive instructional systems, and assessment products. Ivan came to WGen after helping to found UpCompany, where, as CTO, he built a team which successfully launched Tracked.com . Before that, Ivan was at a company, called Clique, with a very questionable business model. Ivan knew he failed (in his stubborn attempt to avoid leadership responsibilities for a doomed company) when he was promoted from Software Architect to Senior Director of Advanced Technology. In spite of this, he doggedly disavows responsibility for Clique being a flop, claiming that had the Clique owners heeded the insights contained in this very blog, the company's total lifetime revenue would have skyrocketed past the $0.00 mark. At Clique, in addition to launching this mildly subversive blog, he diligently implemented technology that was patented as CRUSH. He found Clique to be a great place to hone his C++ multi-threaded coding skills while focusing his primary attention on his beautiful bride and new family.
Before Ivan hot-glued a "Homeward Bound" banner to the side of a UHaul, he was stationed in Seattle, in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. "Don't tell anyone," Ivan would routinely say to candidates he was attempting to relocate, "Seattle's rainy reputation is just a PR campaign to keep away all the gullible people." He would then cite the true fact that NYC gets more annual rainfall than Seattle. Ivan's programming and managerial skills really flourished during his 6 year West Coast stint. Ivan was relocated to Seattle when Amazon.com acquired Convergence Corporation, a pioneer in wireless applications. At Convergence, he helped develop a scalable wireless e-commerce engine. At Amazon, Ivan helped launch Amazon.com's award-winning Anywhere initiative. His roles there included architecting and engineering all of Amazon's major mobile initiatives, including the world's first mobile shopping and auction applications on cell phones and PDAs. After a year of "Get Big Fast," Ivan took off his golden handcuffs, and founded Siaxx Corporation. As CTO, he lead the development of nAble, the web service based "Universal Remote Control" for IT operations management. Siaxx released nAble right in the middle of IT's nuclear winter. At the time, companies had just paid for major Y2K upgrades, and with the bursting of the dot com bubble, their budgets were minimal. Against the odds, however, Siaxx managed to eventually turn a miniscule profit, prompting the founders to quickly abandon ship and find "real jobs."
As a result, Ivan went to Coco Communications, as Vice President of Technology. He led Coco to grow from a 3 person technology startup to a successful company. At Coco, Ivan grew the technical team to 40 people who successfully developed 6 product lines sold to several customers, including the United States Government.
A long time ago, in a millennium far, far away, Ivan left his home in NJ to go to live in Boston. At the time, MIT did not have a liberal telecommute policy, and required students to actually attend class and learn stuff. While at MIT, Ivan founded his first company, Vispertek Corporation, a medical device company aimed at early detection of visual diseases. At MIT, he also taught microprocessors (including Z80 assembly!) at the night school. After graduating early, he founded an independent consulting corporation aimed at delivering software applications for larger corporations. His clients included Lotus Development Corporation, Avid Technology, and Intel.
Since his basketball days at MIT where he graduated with a SB in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, pre-med, and a successful business plan; Ivan has won an Academy Award (MPAA "Oscar") for technical achievement, testified to government legislature, spent a year teaching English in Ecuador, presented at conferences, climbed over 20,000 feet, ran the Boston Marathon, and patented CRUSH.
You can find a more linear, hyperlinked presentation of my career by reading my online resume.