In 2006, Merrick Furst was the undergraduate dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He’d had a remarkable career: he was one of the co-inventors of probabilistic circuit analysis, was dean of the graduate program in computer science at Carnegie Mellon, and then president at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, before moving to Atlanta. Furst had an entrepreneurial bent: in between academic stints, he’d founded several companies. The most notable was Essential Surfing Gear, which was likely the first company to provide apps for web browsing. Essential Surfing Gear was sold in 2000.
Great story that hits close to home. I was at GT during this time ('04-'08), and know a handful of people who passed through Damballa in various roles. They even named the new College of Computing building on campus after Dr. Furst!
Here for this crossover as well, super surprising article to read. I remember Dr Furst as a life-changingly good algorithms professor (2018ish) with lots of stories from that genre. I don’t think he mentioned non-academic business once the whole semester. People are multi-faceted, I guess!
I wonder who the Damballas of the peak 2020/21 funding era are. I suspect there are at least a handful. That was the final hurrah of ZIRP and a lot of companies raised a lot of money based on unclear product demand or at least fleeting demand. Clubhouse was the poster child but I think there are a few others that are still chugging along that haven’t yet been revealed.