On this day a much younger version of me left a design seat as an Autodesk customer and started with Autodesk in San Rafael California.
Here is Autodesk customer Shaan Hurley, Mechanical Designer of Oregon Iron Works Portland Oregon in 1997. I was interviewed for the AutoCAD R14 demo CD.
Here is my first Autodesk employee badge as well as a photo of me in my san Rafael office.
Autodesk was hovering around $6.50 a share price and now is over $110 per share although I cant really claim any credit for the increased valuation. In 1998 I moved from Portland Oregon to the Bay Area where I joined AutoCAD Product Management with Eric Stover and Jeff Allen and a couple others awesome deskers on the Autodesk Beta Team. I joined during AutoCAD R14 development and on the heels of R13 when Autodesk needed some more customer focus and connection to prevent problematic releases from impacting customers.
I have been involved in beta of most Autodesk products at some point over the past 20 years and…