Jason Cohen

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

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5 more...

Education

The University of Texas at Austin

Recommended

4 people have recommended Jason

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 2009 — Present (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 2003 — July 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 2005 — July 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 2003 — July 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 2003 — October 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 1999 — June 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 1998 — April 1999 (6 months)

Refactored development techniques for the eWallet division
Developer

Photodex

(Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

August 1995 — November 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 1994 — August 1995 (1 year 4 months)

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