William Drury

Current

• Senior Software Engineer at Idealab

Past

• Web Developer at X1 Technologies
• Founder at CategoryWEB
• Co-Founder at XAO, Inc.

• CTO, Founder at Brave New Worlds

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Education

• Williams College

Recommended

3 people have recommended William

Connections

42 connections

Industry

Internet

William Drury’s Summary

Entrepreneur who has founded several internet software start-up companies over past 7 years. Focus on consumer- and advertising-driven business models. Experience selling a company, and negotiating for the purchase of another.

Hands-on coder who leads small 'surgical' teams in designing and building new internet services. Has managed both in-house and remote teams, developing specifications and test suites to insure quality. Regularly implements prototype systems in multiple programming languages, including PERL, C, and Java.

William Drury’s Specialties:

Product design, prototyping, refactoring, team and project leadership, general business management, entrepreneurship, bootstrapping startup tactics and strategy.

William Drury’s Experience

• Senior Software Engineer

  Idealab

  (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Internet industry)

  October 2007 — Present (8 months)

  Prototyping ideas for potential new companies, testing and evaluating the technical feasibility of new web-centered business ideas. Currently attached to New Ventures group.

• Web Developer

  X1 Technologies

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)

  December 2004 — March 2007 (2 years 4 months)

  Redesigned, built and maintained the company's ecommerce website from scratch - with complete unit testing suite - in record time. Could not have done it without a team of (onshore and offshore) programmers, a great project manager, and dedicated HTML coders. Over the next two years, the company changed revenue models several times, and we changed to continue supporting it. In that time we integrated heavily with third party services like Cybersource (online payment), Omniture (*extensive* traffic analysis and reporting), Salesforce (the website was the main lead generation and bug tracking interface), CheetahMail, On24, Unisfair, Adapt, Google Analytics, etc. Spent a great deal of time in the last 6 months working in the JavaScript/AJAX arena, contributing pieces to the existing client product, and prototyping a next-generation browser-based client for the X1 Enterprise Server.

• Founder

  CategoryWEB

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

  September 2002 — December 2004 (2 years 4 months)

  Created and managed web properties, including CategoryWEB site directory with paid inclusion. Directed contractors and part-time employees in furtherance of same.

• Co-Founder

  XAO, Inc.

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

  June 2001 — September 2004 (3 years 4 months)

  Determine overall strategy, identify new revenue sources, imagine, design, and build new products and services.

• CTO, Founder

  Brave New Worlds

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)

  October 1996 — November 2000 (4 years 2 months)

  Co-Founder and CTO of Brave New Worlds, a company that built and hosted customized e-commerce websites. Designed, built and maintained our Open Source e-commerce solution, Symphero, and managed a team of programmers, graphic artists and sysadmins who customized and deployed Symphero for our customers. Our company was purchased by VA Linux in 2000.

William Drury’s Education

• Williams College

  BA, Political Science, Computer Science, Literary Theory, World Religions, 1987 — 1991

  Activities and Societies:

  Mucho Macho Moo-Cow Marching Band, Karate Club Founding Member, Model UN, many bands including: I-Bankers - Groovatron - Catwalk Mambo