behind the towers

The founders of Wellfleet Communications – Paul, Jennifer, me, Dave, and Steve below – were all early employees of InterLAN, importantly Wellfleet’s predecessor and one of Ethernet’s pioneer proponents. Wellfleet was not our first rodeo.

I first met Paul Severino during the summer of 1980. I was a systems engineer with DEC’s Microcomputer Products Line – marketing the LSI-11/2, peripheral hardware and software to OEMs and system integrators – and was the group’s engineering representative to the corporation’s Ethernet specification effort. So I had early insight into what a computer’s Ethernet interface might look like, and I was convinced that I knew what a good design would look like.

I had arranged to meet Paul at a pizza joint in Framingham, MA where we talked about design requirements for an Ethernet computer interface, and I drew a block diagram on a paper napkin. Yep, the proverbial napkin sketch. Paul was the vice president of engineering and manufacturing for Data Translation – a manufacturer of add-on peripheral hardware for PDP-11s and LSI-11s that I had previously used for a project at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory where I had worked in the late 70s – and was interested in starting a new company in “the local networking space”. That conversation led him to making me an offer as the first engineer hired to start what became InterLAN.

Paul had graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, New York, in the early 70’s. He worked for a time at Digital Equipment Corporation, and later joined Bill Poduska’s engineering team at Prime Computer. In the mid-70’s, he became the vice president of engineering and manufacturing for Data Translation. When I met Paul in 1980, he had been in discussions with Prime’s former vice president of marketing, Russ Planitzer, who had joined the venture capital firm J.H. Whitney of New York City, about funding a startup in local networking.

Dave Rowe was InterLAN’s founding CFO having come from stints at W.R. Grace and Charles River Labs after graduating from Dartmouth College. At Wellfleet’s founding, Dave was the company’s COO which, despite having all but five employees, was deemed necessary to “build a really big company”. In fact, Dave was Wellfleet’s CFO for the first few years during the company’s initial growth phase, leaving the company a few months prior to Wellfleet’s IPO.

Steve Willis is a native of Bedford, MA where Wellfleet opened its first office at 12 DeAngelo Drive in June, 1986. He graduated from UMass-Amherst with a B.S. in computer science in 1978. Steve worked as a real-time process software engineer at BTU International from 1978 until he came to InterLAN in 1982. He came into InterLAN knowing very little about networking technology, but became a renowned expert in the field later in his career. As it later became apparent, Steve’s rapid rise up the networking learning curve at InterLAN would serve as a valuable model for how he and I later recruited many of Wellfleet’s product development engineers.

Jennifer Lamonakis was Wellfleet’s office manager and administrative assistant, having come from a nearly identical role at InterLAN. Jennifer was from the U.K., worked in a variety of administrative roles including marketing and order administration at InterLAN beginning in 1982.  Jennifer was recruited from MICOM-InterLAN in 1986 to join Wellfleet’s finance group, but in reality she kept us all in line, and the office running, handling everything from purchasing furniture, maintaining the books, and keeping us well-stocked in all manner of paper products.

As for me, Bill Seifert, I hold two degrees from Michigan State, BSEE and MSEE. Leaving MSU in 1975, I went to work for the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory as one of their first microprocessor engineers. I moved to Massachusetts in the fall of 1979 to work for Digital Equipment where, among other tasks, served as a reviewer of the DEC-Intel-Xerox Ethernet specification, published in September, 1980. I joined InterLAN in early 1981, and after leaving InterLAN in late 1985, served as the founding Vice President, Engineering of Wellfleet in 1986.  Later, I was made the Chief Technology Officer of Wellfleet, which put me in front of a variety of audiences including IEEE Conferences, IETF working groups, large customers, and strategic partners, both domestically and internationally.

InterLAN had brought us together in the formative years of Ethernet and local networking, providing us valuable experience and insight into the future of computer communications. Wellfleet would bring us together for an encore that would prove to be more frenzied than Mozart’s Symphony No.25 in G Minor (opening soundtrack of the movie “Amadeus”).