Meet our team

Rob began his software career in an artificial intelligence laboratory in Tokyo, writing natural language translation systems in Lisp. His early interest in languages, both natural and artificial, led him to follow the evolution of software engineering into object orientated systems and databases, Smalltalk development, and Agile methodologies. Rob co-founded Pivotal with the goal of providing clients a combination of hard core software engineering techniques and flexible methods as an integrated, disciplined approach to software development. As Pivotal's CEO, Rob has grown the company into a major provider of agile enablement services for software development organizations. He also provides the vision for Pivotal's rapidly expanding product development and start-up bootstrapping practice. Rob graduated from the University of California at Berkeley.

Sherry began her career in environmental science at the U.S. Geological Survey. Her experience with geographic information systems evolved into a broader professional interest in software, systems analysis, project management and new or unconventional forms of software delivery. As co-founder of Pivotal, Sherry worked with Rob to ensure that the company's consulting services maintained a sharp focus on the customer, applying the emerging discipline of Agile methodologies to provide clients with greater predictability and transparency in the development process. As Pivotal has evolved, Sherry has taken on the roles of CFO and COO, working with Rob and the company's principals to guide the firm through a period of rapid growth. Sherry earned her degrees from Stanford University.

Edward has coached teams in a wide variety of business and technical domains, including complex enterprise software and some of the world's largest auction and search websites. Edward has deep experience with object-orientated techniques and is highly proficient in the modeling and design of large-scale business systems. Using his extensive web development knowledge and relentless focus on developer testing practices, he enjoys working with teams to deliver quality software for high-volume websites. Edward is the author of JsUnit, the first unit testing tool for JavaScript. He has made numerous contributions to agile and Extreme Programming literature. Edward holds a degree in Mathematics from Oxford University, England.

Ian started working with worldwide distributed Hypertext systems in 1989, working with Ted Nelson at Autodesk. He was on the launch team at HotWired, and was one of the 4 people who by circumstance would determine that banner ads would be 468x60. After HotWired, he founded Neo Communication, a consultancy working with companies like IDG and Sony. At Neo, he started doing Java development in 1995, developing the first client-server application ever built in Java, as part of the public launch of Java at SunWorld. He was Java Evangelist at Symantec for VisualCafé, and was Sr. Director of Technology at HSX.com, before returning to consulting, and later writing Mastering Tomcat Development for J. Wiley and Sons. He joined Friendster in 2004 as employee #4, becoming Chief Architect as the company grew from 120,000 to 6,000,000 users, growing the physical plant from 4 machines to over 300 machines, and automating configuration and cluster management. Ian speaks frequently on the importance of Agile, Rails and the Cloud, both from a business and a technical perspective.

Dan has been building large applications since the Smalltalk era, and has been a practitioner and proponent of Agile methods since the earliest days of Extreme Programming. He has led projects and engagements in a variety of industries, and has been instrumental in the successful adoption of agile methods at some of the world's largest e-commerce companies. Dan works closely with Pivotal Labs' clients to ensure continued project success, and manages the development effort for Pivotal Tracker, Pivotal Labs' award-winning project collaboration software.

Christian was Vice President of Engineering of Nominum, a leading provider of industry-leading network naming and addressing solutions, from 2003-2005. Before joining Nominum, Christian was co-founder of the GaiaCom Corporation, a New York based consulting and software development firm. He has worked in a diverse set of industries, from finance to fashion, on both commercial software and internal IT applications. Christian holds a degree in Computer Science from Harvard University.

Mike began his career in software development as a research assistant in the Johns Hopkins planetary physics department and NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute. Quickly realizing that the software interested him more than the science, he spent the next decade in NYC's financial markets building trading systems and evangelizing new technology and agile methodologies. He later joined a distributed computing startup which introduced him to nascent "cloud computing" technology and taught him how to stay agile while building enterprise software. Mike co-founded a successful startup in 2007 that built a Rails-based energy market data service. He maintains a strong presence in the Ruby open-source community, authoring and maintaining several popular libraries including Nokogiri and Mechanize. Mike currently leads Pivotal's New York practice, and codes whenever he has time.