Career 2.0: Map of a New Contact

Introduction

In our most recent article, we detailed how to successfully start a dialog with your professional peers.

This article is the first installment of a two-part case study for building new contacts for the first of the three companies suggested by Code Project member Marc Clifton.

This was the first time we'd heard of Intentional Software, although we definitely knew of Charles Simonyi and his technology achievements.

Scoping out a Company

Company websites are great starting points to research a company, its staff, its products, and future direction. The company website is also your first source for interview preparation once you've made a good contact with a hiring manager.

We followed Marc's web link to the company's home page (www.intentsoft.com) to determine the company's key decision makers, and what makes them tick.

Intentional Software's home page lists the company mission statement:

"To improve software development productivity and quality by making the code look like the design." (http://www.intentsoft.com/corp_mission.html)

 The company product:

Intentional Software Corporation will develop tools and technology based on a synthesis of recent innovations including aspect-oriented programming (AOP), generative (or transformational) programming (GP), intentional programming (IP), model-integrated computing (MIC) and others.

Product Development Status:

"The company is now beginning the product development process, and so it is too early to discuss product details. Early products will be a synthesis of recent research results and current best practices. The company will create early prototypes to better discuss the technology with potential customers and the industry in general." (http://www.intentsoft.com/faq.html#q6)

Target Customers:

In the long-term, any software programmer or developer will be a potential customer of Intentional Software products. One early target audience may be those programmers who have already embraced the AspectJ programming language developed by co-founder Gregor Kiczales and his team at Xerox PARC (http://www.intentsoft.com/faq.html#q6)

Current hiring status information:

Intentional Software Corporation is located in Bellevue, Washington. Some of the programming work will take place at two subcontractor sites in Budapest, Hungary. (http://www.intentsoft.com/faq.html#q6)

Company funding:

The company does not list any financial investors, so we suspected it is primarily funded by the two founders. A recently added link to a Seattle Times article confirmed that Simonyi is personally funding the company.

Had the site included information on financial backers, we would have noted that information to further research the venture capital company/companies' website for the VC firm's decision makers and the VC's other portfolio companies, mainly to identify people who might have influence with Intentional Software's founders.

Corporate Contacts

There are three links from the "Corporate Info" tab on the home page. One includes detailed biographies of the two company founders. Information we tracked for future research from Charles Simonyi's biography:

• He worked at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) from 1972-1980 where he created the first WYSIWYG text editor called Bravo
• He was born in Budapest, Hungary
• Simonyi earned his B.S. in engineering mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley
• He earned a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pecs in Hungary, in 2001.
• Simonyi was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 for his contributions to "widely used productivity software."
• He has served on the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since 1998.
• Simonyi endowed a chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and a chair for Theoretical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study.
• He collects modern art, enjoys classical music and is an experienced pilot.

Information we tracked for future research from Gregor Kiczales' biography:

• He holds a position of Vice-President of Development.
• He was formerly a Professor at the University of British Columbia.
• Kiczales was a Principal Scientist at Xerox' Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
• He led the PARC team that developed the AspectJ programming language.
• He was a member of PARC's ANSI CLOS design team.
• Kiczales was lead designer of the CLOS metaobject protocol.
• He co-authored with Jim des Rivieres and Danny Bobrow of "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol" (MIT Press, 1991).

Corporate Information

From the Newsroom tab, we linked to the company's launch press release, "New Venture Set for Dramatic Improvement of Software Code," dated September 17, 2002 (http://www.intentsoft.com/pr_091702.html). From this release, we quickly learned that the company aligns itself closely with Microsoft, as the release included:

• A quote from Bill Gates.
• A statement from Simonyi, "I am excited to be continuing that work in the focused environment of our new company and with Microsoft's blessing, which is very important to me."
• Microsoft's NASDAQ trading symbol and company summary.

Why would a company do this? Intentional Software is a very new company. We learned by reading the FAQ that the company was founded August 2002. (http://www.intentsoft.com/faq.html).

One of the founders worked a large portion of his career at the company and reached a senior technical level ("Distinguished Engineer"). And most people are familiar with Microsoft. By prominently featuring Microsoft in their launch announcement, Intentional sought to share Microsoft's track record.

Under the Feedback tab, we found:

• Link for a brief survey. (http://www.intentsoft.com/feedback_survey.html)
• Link for both Charles' and Gregor's contact information, including their individual email addresses. (http://www.intentsoft.com/contact.html)
• A "Flame us" link which demonstrated their sense of humor.

The founders are hard-core math and technology geeks:

• http://www.intentsoft.com/corp_logo.html
• http://www.intentsoft.com/glossary.html
• http://www.intentsoft.com/faq.html

Sometimes recruiters are geeks, too.

While researching this website, we discovered an interesting side note: according to the Seattle Times article noted above, Microsoft gave Simonyi permission to use some of Microsoft's intellectual property at the new company. However, Intentional Software's site runs on Apache.

Coming up...

Please join us in our next column where we detail, step-by-step how to utilize this information to build an effective contact strategy for this company.

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