Greg
About Charter Street
When Greg first started Versai, he negotiated a deal on a 13,000 sq. ft. warehouse on Charter Street in Redwood City. When people think about Silicon Valley startups, they think about garages in leafy neighborhoods like Palo Alto. When they think about venture backed companies, they think about modern office buildings surrounded by palm tree-lined jogging trails. Our warehouse has none of these qualities. It’s in an industrial section of Redwood City (one of the few remaining industrial sections in Silicon Valley). We’re surrounded by small factories, machine shops and 60 year old Quonset huts. Many of our neighbors are small businesses that have been around for many years and have succeeded the old-fashioned way – by hard work and by serving customers.
To us, Charter Street represents everything that a start-up should be and is a dramatic contrast to the excesses of the tech boom of the late 1990’s in Silicon Valley. You won’t find any Aeron chairs here. Despite our VC funding, on most days we don’t turn the heat on (forget about air conditioning) and we make sure we turn the lights off when we leave.
Our blog is about entrepreneurship, the internet, and the state of the software industry. It’s also a chronicle of a group of hard working people trying to get a new company off the ground (and trying to live up to the standard set by our neighbors). We couldn’t think of a more fitting name than Charter Street.
About the Authors
Paul McNamara
Paul McNamara: CEO of Coghead. Senior Vice President and General Manager at SGI (2001-2005). EIR at El Dorado Ventures (2005). Executive officer and VP of Business Development at Red Hat (1998 – 2001). Founder and President of Asset Management Technologies (1994 – 1998). Graduate of Drexel University with BS in Mechanical Engineering (1984).
Greg Olsen
CTO and Founder of Coghead, an innovative new software as a service provider. Previously, Greg co-founded Extricity , a business-to-business integration platform provider that was acquired by Peregrine Systems. At Peregrine, he directed new platform efforts as VP of Development. Before Extricity, Greg managed projects at EIT (Enterprise Integration Technologies), one of the first Internet technology companies. Greg's doctoral research focused on computational support for distributed engineering teams. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from Stanford University, and M.S. and B.S. degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
