My Goal is simple:
Build a strong, sustainable company that sells elegant software capable of enthusing and delighting my customers.
I am not interested in social media gimmickry or being the next flavor of the month. I believe that the best way to build a profitable enterprise is to create an easy-to-use product for the right market segment that solves a real problem.
Build something of value and sell it. It’s pretty simple.
Aaron Brethorst
425-241-4008 // aaron@structlab.com
1450 E Republican St #203
Seattle, WA 98112
Structlab LLC – Seattle WA
Founder/Principal October 2008 – Present
Built a highly regarded, profitable consulting and contracting firm in a down economy.
Structlab-branded iOS apps:
- Created Top 10 paid iPhone application, Election ’08, which received over 50,000 downloads, tons of media attention, and over 238 years of combined usage
- Doppler for Heroku – a top-notch PaaS/IaaS cloud management tool for the iPhone and iPad
- Stelr, a FriendFeed social networking client for the iPhone (accepted into the App Store two weeks after Facebook announced the FriendFeed acquisition, tragically).
- Experiments in creating commercial-quality iPhone applications in a single day: Free Barnyard Animals and iCanText.
Structlab-branded Rails apps:
Extensive amounts of experience building products for clients, including:
- Created two iPhone applications for Canonical Group’s Ubuntu One product line with a hard three month deadline timed to simultaneously ship with Ubuntu 10.10
- Ubuntu One Music — A music streaming client that lets its users listen to their Ubuntu One-hosted MP3s anywhere and anytime
- Ubuntu One Contacts — A contact synchronization client that lets its user retrieve and store their contacts in the cloud
Dibspace – Seattle WA
Co-founder Nights and weekends: June 2008 – August 2009; Full-time: August 2009 – May 2010
- I built the product from zero to acquisition.
- Mentored and guided the CEO through spinning up a company, attracting angel investment, performing viral marketing, creating effective web copy, and so forth
- Conceived and designed the innovative ‘My Dibit Life’ marketing campaign, attracting media coverage from TechCrunch and other media outlets
- Grew the Dibspace codebase to support millions of visits and thousands of active small business users throughout the Seattle area
- Wrote and maintained the Ruby on Rails Dibspace.com codebase
- Built and curated our codebase’s 3rd party add-ins, including full-text search with Sphinx, Twitter integration, Facebook Connect authentication and more
- Managed our servers and performed all operations duties
- Conducted usability studies
- Managed contractors
Skytap, Inc. – Seattle WA
Senior Program Manager November 2007 – August 2009
- Single-handedly refined the Skytap Cloud prototype user interface into a shippable product
- As the first Program Manager, I instituted and ran daily standup meetings, created bug management & triage and release management processes and brought measurable order to an otherwise chaotic environment
- Drove scheduling, spec writing, schedule authoring, and some engineering management
- Single-handedly built v2 user interface for the Skytap Cloud product, which is still in use over a year after my departure (hey Skytap folks, if you read this, I’d love to consult you on a v3 user experience; I’d love to see you update your UI!)
Microsoft Corporation – Redmond WA
Program Manager – Microsoft Popfly January 2007 – November 2007
- Designed and implemented the first Popfly user interface, decreasing average page load times by 15%, cutting the product test matrix in half, and substantially improving cross-browser compatibility
- Designed and drove the first implementation of social networking features in Popfly in three weeks with two developers
- Drove advertising strategy and defined implementation plan for serving ads in Popfly
- In addition to Program Management responsibilities, pitched in to fix over 150 product bugs. This enabled our development team to focus on creating new features and helped speed time to market
- Managed vendor relationships to create an improved mashup design experience; brought the project in on time and within budget, satisfying all internal stakeholders
- Managed all security requirements for Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions, ensuring that the entire Express product line was in line with standard Microsoft product security requirements
- Enabled interaction between Popfly team and its user community by managing the creation and daily oversight of community forums, with over 90% of all community questions and issues seeing resolution within two days
Microsoft Corporation – Redmond WA
Program Manager – Visual Studio November 2003 – January 2007
- Managed User Experience for the Visual Studio 2005 product line, balancing requirements for completely different user segments—from non-professional developers to architects—and ensuring an optimal experience across our product line
- Led a thirty person cross-functional virtual team to drive Accessibility requirements and training across a 2000 person division, decreasing Section 508 compliance exceptions by 60%
- Created the Visual Studio user interface guidelines, enabling thousands of engineers inside and outside of Microsoft to create more consistent user experiences with less work, and decreasing UI bug flow by 30%
- Drove the creation of tooling to simplify how Visual Studio’s user interface updates are created, decreasing design group’s time on job by 50% and saving development and test resources weeks of time over the Visual Studio 2008 release
- Found and fixed over 800 user experience bugs, proving instrumental in Visual Studio 2005 earning Infoworld’s Best IDE Award for 2005
- Led a cross-functional virtual team in assessing the state of all nine Microsoft developer tools suites and developing the divisional strategy on Windows Vista compatibility; convinced divisional management on a major realignment of divisional resources, enabling us to ship a compatibility release for Visual Studio 2005
- Led a cross-functional team in developing comprehensive, scenario-oriented plans to modernize and improve the Visual Studio user experience for the Visual Studio 2008 release
- Managed a feature team of developers and testers in creating the new user interface for Visual Studio 2008, while simultaneously cutting over fifty thousand of lines of code
- Worked extensively with partners to improve their products’ user experience by regularly presenting at extensibility developer labs and working one-on-one to give targeted, actionable user interface feedback
- Contributed the cover article for .NET Developer Journal’s June 2005 issue, which introduced thousands of software developers to the Visual Studio VSIP extensibility system
- Designed and executed the first-ever usability study for the Visual Studio SDK, leading to the discovery and correction of severe usability issues across the breadth of the SDK
Chimp Software LLC – Seattle WA
Owner/Founder May 2003 – October 2008
- Conceived of and built the highly-regarded Mac OS X alarm clock iRooster while in college, which sold to over 3000 customers in four years
- Designed, implemented, tested and released seven major revisions of iRooster
- Conceived and executed effective marketing campaigns at extremely low cost, driving exposure to thousands of prospects via a combination of alliance marketing, search marketing and promotional campaigns
- Built a loyal customer base by focusing on delivering beautiful, easy-to-use software
Education
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
University of Minnesota – Twin Cities 2000 – 2003