Jason Cohen

Jason Cohen

Mentor at Capital Factory

Austin, Texas Area

Current
  • Mentor at Capital Factory
Past
  • CEO, founder at Smart Bear Inc
  • Project Consultant at Geist Manufacturing
  • CTO at ITWatchDogs
  • Consultant at DataCert
  • CTO, co-founder at Sheer Genius Software
  • Consultant at GlobeSet
  • Developer at Photodex
  • Developer (intern) at Tracor Areospace
Education
  • The University of Texas at Austin
Connections
290 connections
Industry
Computer Software
Websites

Jason Cohen’s Summary

After co-founding several startups, both bootstrapped and VC-funded, you're not afraid of anything. Or maybe you're afraid of everything...

Jason Cohen’s Specialties:

Building a product / team from scratch. Defining customer pain, designing products accordingly, and communicating the message back to the customer. Not necessarily in that order.


Jason Cohen’s Experience

  • Mentor

    Capital Factory

    (Venture Capital & Private Equity industry)

    June 2009Present (6 months)

    Capital Factory is a seed-stage mentoring program for startups that provides a small amount of seed capital and weekly mentoring sessions by entrepreneurs who have founded successful companies. Startup companies apply to participate in our 10 week summer program intended to get a startup pointed in the right direction with a clear path to profitability and growth.

  • CEO, founder

    Smart Bear Inc

    (Computer Software industry)

    February 2003July 2009 (6 years 6 months)

    Founder, developer, salesman, manager, advertiser, visionary, and changer of the pellets in the urinals.

    Smart Bear makes Code Collaborator (http://codecollab.com) -- the only professional-grade peer code review tool on the market and winner of the Jolt Award. I also wrote the only book on lightweight peer code review technique (http://codereviewbook.com).

    Customers include: Adobe, AOL, Autodesk, Cisco, Cognos, EA Sports, Intuit, Ixia, Pfizer, RIM (Blackberry), Northrup Grumman, Seagate, Siemens, SONIC, and Qualcomm.

    Smart Bear was sold to AutomatedQA in Dec 07.

    http://smartbear.com

  • Project Consultant

    Geist Manufacturing

    (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)

    July 2005July 2006 (1 year 1 month)

    After ITWatchdogs (below) was sold to Geist, I stayed on as a part-part-time project consultant for the product line I helped create.

  • CTO

    ITWatchDogs

    (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

    October 2003July 2005 (1 year 10 months)

    Designed and developed firmware for ARM7 devices for multiple product lines. Grew to 3-man team.

    ITWatchdogs was sold to Geist Manufacturing in July 2005 but still operates under its own name.

    Devices measure server room environments (temp, humidity, air flow, light, sound, power, water, door position) with both internal and external sensors, showing current and historical data through HTTP, SNMP and alarming through SMTP and SNMP.

    http://itwatchdogs.com

  • Consultant

    DataCert

    (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)

    June 2003October 2003 (5 months)

    Lead 2-man team to implement a web-based reporting system for DataCert's AIMS software in record time. Managed remote development.

    http://datacert.com

  • CTO, co-founder

    Sheer Genius Software

    (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

    April 1999June 2003 (4 years 3 months)

    Grew consulting shop to six employees with seven-figure contracts with public companies. Lead team to design and implement tools now installed on tens of thousands of desktops. Managed remote development.

  • Consultant

    GlobeSet

    (Privately Held; 501-1000 employees; Computer Software industry)

    November 1998April 1999 (6 months)

    Refactored development techniques for the eWallet division

  • Developer

    Photodex

    (Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

    August 1995November 1998 (3 years 4 months)

    Ported 750,000 lines of Windows GUI code to Macintosh, Linux, *BSD, and Solaris by creating a Windows API emulation layer so future changes to the Windows base were reflected automatically in the other versions. Implemented several new features in the core product line. Optimized graphics routines in C and x86 assembly.

    http://photodex.com

  • Developer (intern)

    Tracor Areospace

    (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; TTRR; Computer Software industry)

    May 1994August 1995 (1 year 4 months)

    Part of a 3-man team developing business simulation software using cross-platform GUI toolkit Neuron Data.


Jason Cohen’s Education

  • The University of Texas at Austin

    B.A. , Computer Science , 19962000


Additional Information

Jason Cohen’s Websites:

Jason Cohen’s Groups:

Bootstrap Austin, GeekAustin, door64, Coldtowne Theater

  •    On Startups - The Community For Entrepreneurs
  •    Austin High-Tech
  •    Inbound Marketers - For Marketing Professionals
  •    Society for Software Quality | San Diego
  •    Geek Austin
  •    Business of Software
  •    Hi-Tech Ventures & Startups
  •    nPost
  •    Austin QA Professionals
  •    Tech Ranch
  •    Clarus Capital Partners
  •    501 Tech Club Austin
  •    Capital Factory Mentors
  •    ATX Equation
  •    Entrepreneurship Scene

Jason Cohen’s Honors:

2008 Jolt Award for Best Collaboration Tool, Code Collaborator
Patent pending for a static code analysis method


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