Kevin Lawton

Current

• Independent at Independent

Past

• Sr. Director, Virtualization at DeviceVM
• Chief Architect at Sawgrass Systems
• Entrepreneur at concept stage startup ideas

• Team lead and project architect at Montalvo Systems, Inc.
• Software Lead at Plex86 open source project
• Software Consultant at Fabric7
• Project Lead at MandrakeSoft, Inc
• CEO at Bochs Software Company
• Software Engineer / Assistant Staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory

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6 more...

Education

• Brandeis University
• State University of New York at Oswego

Recommended

1 person has recommended Kevin

Connections

144 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

• My Blog
• My Blog

Kevin Lawton’s Summary

I'm interested in leadership role opportunities which involve the business of technology, carrying ideas from concepts forward, big picture thinking, and diligence. Background in technical startups as a software director, lead & architect. Public speaker. Author and lead for two Open Source projects. I also have an interest in financial markets and am open to opportunities in the broader business space, including those in green/sustainable technologies.

Kevin Lawton’s Specialties:

Business oriented, leadership, big picture architecture, creative mind for patentable idea creation, and excellent at diligence of technical companies. I'm also a contributor for Seeking Alpha.

Kevin Lawton’s Experience

• Independent

  Independent

  (Computer Software industry)

  January 2009 — Present (1 year 2 months)

  Investigating cloud computing, distributed/parallel/scientific computing, HPC, hadoop, gpgpu, openCL, and LLVM

• Sr. Director, Virtualization

  DeviceVM

  (Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

  February 2008 — January 2009 (1 year )

  Led advanced virtualization and instant-on/quick-boot R&D. Business development. Met with potential business and technology partners, and customers. Attended numerous conferences, gathered competitive analysis, and created internal market directions projections for Linux, instant-on, and virtualization.

• Chief Architect

  Sawgrass Systems

  (Computer & Network Security industry)

  August 2007 — January 2008 (6 months)

  A seed-funded startup with a focus on creating a network level security shield around each VM, incubated at a Palo Alto VC firm. Involved in virtualization strategy, pre-sales customer visits, VC pitches, intellectual property strategy, competitive strategy, architecture, diligence.

• Entrepreneur

  concept stage startup ideas

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

  September 2006 — July 2007 (11 months)

  Conceptualized startup ideas, technical & market diligence, and worked with other founders to help shape their ideas and create related intellectual property. Joined a number of entrepreneur organizations, attended VC panels, entrepreneur events, and greatly broadened my network.

• Team lead and project architect

  Montalvo Systems, Inc.

  (Privately Held; Semiconductors industry)

  May 2004 — August 2006 (2 years 4 months)

  Architect/project-lead for the architectural simulator, used as the golden reference simulator in the critical path of the company's verification strategy. Lead the team since the project's inception. Traveled to the Bangalore India site to assist with outsourcing and to ramp up the software team. Worked with the company since prior to funding, attended venture capital meetings and potential early customers and partners. Performed early patent diligence. First key software person in the company, and helped hire the software team. Involved in the company's performance modeling and trace gathering efforts, Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) compatibility and verification testing, cosimulation framework, and micro-code architecture/development. Involved in virtualization studies relating to where special hardware vs micro-code is required. Built a transport layer to run characterization tests across many machines. Filed patent applications and disclosures. Microsoft Project.

• Software Lead

  Plex86 open source project

  (Computer Software industry)

  January 2003 — April 2004 (1 year 4 months)

  Led an Open Source software engineering effort to re-spin the heavier weight plex86 virtualization hypervisor to be a lightweight linux-guest only VM, where all IO was channeled through a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). Took the concept to various big iron and Linux vendors, in an attempt to gain traction for a new virtualization paradigm which was not burdened by IO emulation and Linux kernel modification requirements. Wrote guest OS drivers for disk, network, and console, and corresponding hypervisor infrastructure to get plex86 running Linux and a few X windows apps as a proof of concept.

• Software Consultant

  Fabric7

  (Computer Hardware industry)

  March 2002 — December 2002 (10 months)

  The company was in the pre-funding stage of building high-end multi-processor servers for the data center. Performed competitive, performance, and technical diligence, as well as software consulting. Worked with entrepreneurs-in-residence at a VC firm until funding and an office was established.

• Project Lead

  MandrakeSoft, Inc

  (Public Company; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)

  March 2000 — October 2001 (1 year 8 months)

  Lead, conceptualized, architected, and organized the plex86 open source x86 virtualization hypervisor effort to run arbitrary operating systems concurrently on a single physical x86 computer.
  
  Achieved a VM which could execute Windows, Linux, DOS and other operating systems. Plex86 had components of para-virtualization (executing guest code natively within a virtualized wrapper), dynamic translation, and emulation techniques, as well as IO emulation. The architecture consisted of a host application, a host Linux kernel driver, and most importantly the virtual machine monitor (VMM) which provided its own set of page and segment tables as a wrapper around the guest operating system.
  
  Gave a number of plex86 related talks, wrote the world's 1st open paper on the topic of virtualizing x86, referred to in a number of patents.

• CEO

  Bochs Software Company

  (Computer Software industry)

  January 1996 — February 2000 (4 years 2 months)

  Lead, conceptualized, architected, and drove a software product which involved inputs from hundreds of developers. Gave talks at many Linux Expo events worldwide, and wrote an article in Linux Journal. Developed a portable x86 PC emulator "bochs" including CPU, BIOS and hardware IO support, capable of running Windows, Linux, many other operating systems. Bochs was ported to Linux, Windows, Mac, and other host platforms. Implemeted unique features such as a cosimulation debugger, which can drive one emulator and function as a powerful non-intrusive debugger, or drive multiple emulators in a lock-step for validating a given emulator/simulator. Bochs hit project of the month on SourceForge more than once.
  
  Negotiated licensing contracts, and performed related consultation to many companies. Bochs was sold to MandrakeSoft, and consequently Open Sourced.

• Software Engineer / Assistant Staff

  MIT Lincoln Laboratory

  (Educational Institution; Defense & Space industry)

  August 1989 — December 1995 (6 years 5 months)

  Researched a satellite friendly data link layer protocol to support TCP/IP & other protocols more efficiently over high altitude satellites. Implemented satellite telemetry monitoring program with a Tcl/Tk GUI which displays terminals currently logged in and services currently active on communications satellites. Wrote analysis software for a memory controller anomaly on a communications satellite.
  
  Created adaptive nulling program for a phased array antenna. Iterative, adaptive complex number weighting algorithms were used to focus and command the phased array antenna towards given objects.
  
  Wrote many post-processing programs for a hyperthermia phased array cancer treatment project.
  
  Authored a FORTRAN-77 source code "lint" program, to assist in debugging of large scale programs. Also implemented a "ratfor" (free-form FORTRAN) preprocessor for compatibility with a large number of existing Ratfor programs written on a retired mainframe environment.

Kevin Lawton’s Education

• Brandeis University

  Compiler Design with data-flow optimization 1991 — 1992

• State University of New York at Oswego

  B.A. , Computer Science (GPA: 3.8 CS-specific, 3.4 overall) , 1984 — 1988

  Activities and Societies:

  Independent study in Compiler Design

Additional Information

Kevin Lawton’s Websites:

• My Blog
• My Blog

Kevin Lawton’s Interests:

stock markets, snowboarding, skiing, hiking, cycling, ultimate frisbee, traveling, volleyball, swimming, running. GROUPS: svase.org Start-up Phase Forum (board of advisors) CSIXConnect Avastu Research Group

Kevin Lawton’s Groups:

•    Presidio Graduate School
•    Open Source Cloud Computing & Virtualization
•    Avastu Research Group
•    GreenBiz.com -- Green Business Professionals
•    Seeking Alpha Contributors

Kevin Lawton’s Honors:

Blogger, and writer for a number of online sites.

Public speaker at Linux Expos in many countries.
Author of first public paper on x86 virtualization.

Special mention in the credits of the book "Operating Systems: Design And Implementation", 2nd Edition by Andrew S. Tanenbaum (1997) for the use of bochs to run Minix on non x86 platforms.

Published an article about bochs in Linux Journal Issue #29 September 1996, "Bochs: A Portable PC Emulator For Unix/X".

Kevin Lawton’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch