About

Startups I’ve been involved in:

Founder, 2011
Acquired by Twitter in January, 2013.

Crashlytics is building the most powerful – yet lightest weight – crash reporting solution for mobile developers, including iOS and Android.

We announced our seed round of $1 million on October 13, 2011. Read our launch coverage at TechCrunch, Xconomy, and BostInnovation.

We also announced our Series A round of $5 million six months later on April 10, 2012. Read our Series A coverage at TechCrunch, Xconomy, and BostInno.

In 2013, Crashlytics joined forces with Twitter.

Mentor, 2011

Helping startups that are going through the TechStars program.

First Angel investor, 2011

“Wayne has been there from my beginning days as an entrepreneur.  He’s not only been a friend professionally, but a trusted friend outside of the entrepreneurship world.  He came in as the first commit with OnSwipe only 24 hours after we decided to take things to the next level.  Wayne’s experience and advice is something any entrepreneur would be lucky to have.” – Jason L. Baptiste, Founder

Announced on January 13, 2011. OnSwipe transforms and simplify how media companies publish across all touch-enabled devices. With OnSwipe, media content and advertising will appear and function as they do on native websites and applications, providing a magazine-like experience on touch devices. Read my short blog post on the  launch here.

Advisor, 2011

“Wayne was invaluable in assisting and advising with the continuance, direction, and eventual sale of threewords.me. Without him, threewords.me would not have been able to achieve the same level of success that it did.” – Mark Bao, Founder

threewords.me was developed by Mark Bao. It immediately went viral, gaining over a quarter million users in 2 days. It was later acquired by Kevin Ham, a well-known domainer. Read the launch story here, and the sale here.

Founded in 2007.
Prestigious clients. Revenue in the millions.

“Your creativity and artistic talent shines through in your work. It is always a joy to work with you – thank you for everything!” – Maria Shriver, First Lady of California

This is a consulting firm that I co-founded. We were successful in creating a highly targeted sales process that allowed us to get great clients. Our first office was in downtown Boston where we supported over a dozen people, and a much larger staff off-site.  The firm has since relocated, and continues to develop for clients, with a focus on high customer satisfaction.

Founded in 2004.
#1 in its space with a strong community.

The i2hub service leveraged Internet2 for its extremely fast internet speeds. It launched in early 2004, about the same time as Facebook and i2hub ultimately expanded to over 400 universities. Students loved it  and it quickly grew a strong, passionate community. i2hub also appeared in thousands of publications, radio, and television worldwide. Read one of the launch stories here.

Subject to litigation with Facebook; depicted in a related movie called The Social Network.

Involved in 2007.

Lead the online community initiative, 1999-2000
Largest online web community at the time.

Napster at the time had a chatroom built into its software, but as soon as you logged off, your presence was lost. I wanted to leverage then-new technology, online forums, to harness the users and develop a community. I spoke about it to Shawn Fanning and he green-lit the initiative. I lead the project for over a year, which  grew quickly to become the largest online community at the time. The project went through several iterations, from Napster Digital Forums to Napster Ground Zero.  It was a lot of work at the time involving many people. To decompress, during some nights I played Shawn in Quake 3 over the internet and held my own =]  He is one tough gamer to go up against.

Founded in 1998.
Ranked #367 site by Alexa (Gap.com at 404, Walmart.com 538, FedEx.com 886, Nike.com 754).

This was my first company. SceneReview was a news portal with network of five sites that included Scene Review MP3 and Scene Review VCD. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, I was able to successfully build a leading news portal that covered digital entertainment media with a large readership. Alexa ranked it at #367. I sold the network in 2000.

Tools I’ve shipped & Misc Projects:

Written in 1999.
Created the MyAdvantage tool — downloaded and used by millions of users.

MyAdvantage was the premiere tool that gave AllAdvantage users the ability to simulate browsing behavior. It was written about in a Wallstreet Journal article. Shortly after releasing this tool, AllAdvantage Corp. hired me to become a security consultant. I assisted them in their anti-fraud efforts for over a year.

Written in 2002.
Created the Lancraft tool for Warcraft 3. Downloaded and used by hundreds of thousands of players. Still in use today.

Lancraft is a tool to connect Warcraft 3 players together without having to go through Battle.NET. A great gaming community developed around it, and I found out in August that it is still being used today!

First AIM dynamic profile service
Launched in 2001

During the era when AOL Instant Messenger was king, I wrote the first dynamic AOL Instant Messenger profile service with Chrys Bader in 2001.  Chrys founded Vid.ly and Treehouse and is now at Google.

Discovered several id Tech 3 engine security issues.
2001-2002

When Quake 3 came out from id software, it used the most advanced game engine at the time, id Tech 3. It pushed hardware to its limits and made low-latency multiplayer gaming extremely popular. Along with a colleague, we discovered several security issues with the id Tech 3 communication protocols. One gave the ability to control other player’s movements, while another crashed game servers with a simple malformed connect string.

These discoveries weren’t limited to just Quake 3. As id Tech 3 was the best engine available, it was licensed for other major games like Call of Duty, Jedi Knight, Soldier of Fortune 2, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Medal of Honor, Heavy Metal, James Bond, and American McGee’s Alice. At the request of id software CEO Todd Hollenshead, I showed id software the source code to the proof-of-concepts we had written. Each time we found an issue and released the code to them, id software would shortly release a patch to quickly fix the vulnerabilities. You can read one of the advisories here.

Administrator, 1997-2007

TetriNET was one of the most popular multiplayer games. I administrated the TetriNET2 servers.

Nestea2 – Security tool
Written in 1998

Nestea2 demonstrated the “off by one ip header” bug. The bug caused Windows, Linux, BSD, Cisco routers, and even HP printers to crash. You can read the source here.

IRC Server Operator, 1996-2001
EFNet IRC – Largest IRC Network

I was an IRC Operator on irc.colorado.edu and helped make sure it ran smoothly. irc.colorado.edu was also the longest running IRC server on EFNet.