Sallyportal: Madly Blogging Reed

Tags


"tech"


Tech firms come to Reed for skull sessions

Chemistry major Luke Kanies ’96 founded IT giant Puppet Labs, which employs more than 300 people in downtown Portland.

The room is a hubbub of debate about broken code, JSON arrays, and the finer points of system architecture. But we are not in a conference room of a tech startup. We are gathered in a Reed classroom for an innovative event organized by the Center for Life Beyond Reed.

Its name? MindStorm.

Huddled at a whiteboard typically devoted to Milton and Hobbes, a group of students led by former math major Chris Fesler ’96 discussed the minutiae of designing service discovery protocols with all the earnestness of Odysseus begging Achilles to return to the siege of Troy. In lay terms, a service discovery protocol tells individual copies, or instances, of programs how to find and communicate with each other—so that if, for example, one instance of a security program fails, another can quickly armor up to continue its defense. Or so that, in the case of Fesler’s financial clearing company, Apex Clearing, a member of al Qaeda can’t sell shares on the New York Stock Exchange when one of Apex’s trade screening systems goes down.

Reedies Take Spotlight in Portland’s Tech Scene

Chemistry major Luke Kanies ’97 is the founder and CEO of Puppet Labs, a high-tech Portland startup that employs more than 190 people. Photo by Vivian Johnson

Reedies are taking an increasingly prominent role in Portland’s high-tech sector.

Last year, Twitter snapped up Lucky Sort, an analytics company founded by Noah Pepper ’09, for an undisclosed sum.

Now two other local tech firms founded by Reedies--Puppet Labs and Urban Airship--have been identified as likely candidates to go public in the next year.

CB Insights, a venture capital and angel investment database that tracks activity related to private companies, speculates that both Puppet Labs and Urban Airship are poised for an IPO, or initial public offering--a critical step in the life of a tech start-up, much like a Broadway debut for a young playwright.