LP Spotlight: Homegrown Billion Dollar Founder, Chris Gladwin
Chris Gladwin is an under the radar technology pioneer who has been at the inflection point of every major software and hardware advancement...and he's done it all from Chicago.
As a Chicagoan and as an employee of P33 Chicago, I knew that Chris was a big deal for building Cleversafe, Inc., a cloud storage company that sold to IBM for over $1.4B. But I had no idea until I interviewed him last week that he had been at the table with nearly every famous tech person you can think of. So much of his story may sound lucky…being in the right place at the right time with the right ideas. But if you’re like me and believe that luck is preparation+opportunity+optimism, you’ll see Chris made his own luck.
Here are 10 things you probably don’t know about one of Chicago’s homegrown multibillion dollar founders:
1. Chris is not a Chicago native. He was raised in Columbus, OH by middle class divorced parents, where he learned to solve problems in the physical world by working on his father’s hobby farm and where he built such a successful paper route that he was able to pay for his own education at MIT.
2. From an early age, Chris had a keen eye and ability to identify and capitalize on trends…first demonstrated in a prescient stock purchase of a neighbor’s company, Levi Strauss, that expanded his paper route wealth by 10X!
3. At 19, he followed a friend at MIT heading to register for the only tech entrepreneurship class in the entire country and perhaps the world, emboldening Chris to submit a proposal (which he won) to help a large company adopt and network the burgeoning technology of personal computers, even though he had never even touched a personal computer. He was so successful, he ran that company throughout college.
4. Despite early entrepreneurial success, Chris chose to take a job after MIT at Lockheed Martin and found himself in Washington, D.C. on a team in charge of $350M in annual software purchasing. That size meant that they were not just massive clients of companies like IBM, Microsoft, etc., but they actually got to help design the software, putting Chris in the room with iconic tech leaders like Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs, brainstorming how to improve their technologies at the early age of 23.
5. The end of the Cold War was the surprising reason Chris came to Chicago in 1991, as he and his boss left the national security industry to move to
Zenith Data Systems, the largest portable PC maker in the world. There, he and his boss created a new division of mobile computing using tablets that was being deployed for military and government contracts.
6. He became an entrepreneur less intentionally than you’d think given his teenage years. His team later got fired during a merger with Packard Bell. But he convinced the new CEO to invest in and handover the IP for the entire mobile business, creating Cruise Technologies, the first wireless table computers, where Chris’s team had to write their own OS, their own TCP/IP (Internet) network client software, to be able to use what would become Wifi.
7. Although he pioneered an industry, Chris did not make his fortune from Cruise. Their cutting edge technology attracted attention from tech giants, and eventually Microsoft pushed Cruise out of the market by integrating a competing technology and offering it for free. At 31, he had to start over.
8. In 1999, he and some friends had a revelation. Music files could be compressed to a size where they would only take up about ⅓ of a hard drive and home internet now had enough bandwidth to download these compressed files, so they started MusicNow, which despite launching amid 46 other well funded competitors, became one of 4 companies to survive, miraculously being the only music company to raise after the dotcom bust. Despite growing 15% month over month, they couldn’t get the capital they needed to grow and ultimately had to sell the company in an auction to Circuit City, which would eventually sell MusicNow again to become AOL Music.
9. The business of storing and selling music plus a 4 month sabbatical reading history of encryption in World War II led to his next epiphany in 2004, when he realized that he could use encryption technology and linear algebra to build a better format for data storage and transfer. This new company, Cleversafe, would go on to sell to IBM 10 years later for $1.4B and made over 80 people in Chicago millionaires.
10. But Chris wasn’t done building. He used his wealth to build three new innovations for Chicago:
--P33 Chicago, a nonprofit that he co-founded with Penny Pritzker and the Civic Committee to drive Chicago’s innovation economy.
--The Forge: Lemont Quarries, an environmental restoration and outdoor recreation retreat in the suburbs of Chicago.
--Ocient, the next homegrown multi-billion dollar company building the most advanced software for analyzing very large complex data sets.
If I had to summarize Chris Gladwin’s impact in one sentence it would be:
Chris Gladwin is an under the radar technology pioneer who has been at the inflection point of every major software and hardware advancement, and he has proven that world changing innovations can be built anywhere…not just in Silicon Valley.