Carl Erickson

Carl Erickson started Atomic Object in the summer of 2001 with Bill Bereza, one of his former students at Grand Valley State University. They raised Atomic from the ashes of a dot-com startup where he had been VP of Engineering. When that company failed to get a second round of funding, it went under and left them with some office furniture, three interns, the remainder of a lease, and a missing month's pay. (We still use the office furniture, one of those three intern is now co-CEO, and he long since stopped missing the $10,000 final paycheck.)