Joel Nash

Entrepreneur

Bootstrapped As One Technologies (now Savigent Software) to $5M in revenue. Led sales efforts that led to sales with large manufacturers (e.g. Ford, Seagate).

I am fulfilled by solving problems for people

The most rewarding aspect of being an entrepreneur is the ability to create and make things happen. The most frustrating aspect is the lack of resources that make it difficult to quickly move forward.

It seems that there aren't enough entrepreneurs who go after the big problems facing our world.

1. Follow your heart.
2. Be yourself but continue to grow.
3. Never give up.

I am a seasoned entrepreneur who is driven by the belief that people can and should be better served by their connected world. The problems of point solutions, islands of smart devices and overwhelming amounts of information are nothing new; I founded my first business to address these problems while providing mission-critical, enterprise-class systems to manufacturers including Ford and Seagate. We integrated with and normalized data from disparate technologies to make them work together. Perhaps most importantly, we learned the importance of leveraging knowledge of context to make sense of overwhelming amounts of data.

When looking at the Internet of Things, proliferation of content and proliferation of apps I see problems that are very familiar. Today I am applying what I have learned with complex manufacturers to address problems for consumers and the businesses that serve them. We are pioneering a type of personal integration and automation that is driven by knowledge of personal context.

I am driven by the following beliefs:

1. Our ability to generate information is ahead of our ability to manage and utilize this information; there is a need to tap fire hoses and personalize.
2. The more a product or service knows about a person the better they can serve them.
3. Products and services that utilize only snippets of contextual knowledge are limited in their ability to personalize how they serve people. 
4. It is beyond the reach of nearly all businesses to obtain broad knowledge of personal context.
5. Attempts to obtain knowledge of personal context often intrude on personal privacy.
6. People should be in control over their contextual data, including what is known about them and how it is utilized.
7. The "app for everything" approach is inherently limited because each app knows only snippets of contextual knowledge and there is a practical limit to how many apps each person can use.
8. People should be in control.

Personal automation and integration, which are driven by knowledge of context and context-specific permissions, have the potential to improve life for people. People will receive context-relevant information with less noise while having a wide-range of tasks performed for them. Businesses will also benefit by delivering what their customers want, without the business having to obtain contextual data on a one-off basis. Perhaps most importantly, the person must be in complete control and must be served in a way that is relevant to them!