About
I am currently the CEO of Urban Airship and proud father of two beautiful children.
My Professional Life Story in Three Paragraphs
A native of the Mid-West I moved out to Oregon in 1980 with my family and never looked back. Graduated from Beaverton High School in 1992 and Oregon State University in 1997 (once a Beaver, always a Beaver I suppose). I worked for a couple of dot com’s (amazon.com, rulespace.com, pdaverticals.com) and returned to OSU to start the Open Source Lab.
The Open Source Lab was a culmination of OSU’s use, development and hosting of open source projects. While at the OSL we engaged in software development projects like Maintain, Ockham, Kuali and many others. We also built a massive hosting infrastructure to support the Mozilla Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, the Linux Kernel and many, many others. I really enjoyed building the OSL and working with everyone there; it was an amazing team that did something that everyone said we couldn’t do.
In the Spring of 2006 I met Larry Drebes the founder of JanRain. Fruitful discussions led me down the path of deciding to make the jump and “get off the sidelines” to become a part of the JanRain team. I spent just shy of a year there helping shape the OpenID landscape, build several new products and really get the company poised for success as the leaders in their space. JanRain was named by Business 2.0 to their list of 25 startups to watch in 2007.
I’m am currently CEO and co-founder of Urban Airship, in Portland, OR.
Memberships
- Board member Software Association of Oregon
- Advisor to Second Porch
Previous Memberships
- Board of Advisors Legion of Tech
- Advisor to Shizzow
- Advisor to Citizen Agency
- Vice-chair, OpenID Foundation (2009)
- Chairman of the Board, OpenID Foundation (2007-2008)
- Advisor to ClickPass
- Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneurs – POSSE
- Board of Technical Advisors, LinuxFund.org
- Technical Board of Advisors, Open Technology Business Center
Things of Note
I’ve been really lucky to be selected for some very nice honors as of late:
- Named as InformationWeek’s ‘Change Agents’ – December 2005
- Named to Red Herring ‘25 Titans in Waiting’ – JanRain Man – December 2006
Professional Bio
I’m sometimes asked to provide a professional bio for conference websites or publications. I’m doing that here so I can direct people to it in the future:
“Scott brings 12 years of experience building technology, developing business strategy and leading engineering teams with companies like Amazon.com, Rulespace, JanRain, Vidoop and now Urban Airship. While working at Oregon State University Scott co-founded the Open Source Lab helping open source projects like Mozilla, Linux, Apache, Drupal grow into mainstream usage. Scott was named to Red Herring’s list of ‘25 Titans in waiting’ in early 2007 and holds a BS in Computer Science from Oregon State University. Scott speaks publicly on identity and the “open web” as well as being an avid gardener, bacon lover, and father living in Portland, OR.”