After twenty years as founder and CEO of the company that makes Vectorworks software, Richard Diehl is retiring from the biz, with Sean Flaherty taking over. Mr. Flaherty was employee #2, and is now a senior vice president and the chief technology officer. Mr. Diehl continues as chairman of the board of Nemetschek North America.
Could Mr Diehl be the last founder-CEO of a CAD company?
One of the lowlights of the last 20 years was the lawsuit brought by Hungarian CAD company Graphisoft against Graphsoft -- as the company was known originally. They agreed on renaming it to Diehl Graphsoft.
After German CAD company Nemetschek AG failed in its attempt to establish its Allplan architectural software in North America, the German bought out the American, renaming the company Nemetschek North America.
Pat Hanratty is still founder/ceo of MCS, since about 1970. You can trace a the bulk of the CAD industry back to his original program, Adam.
Mike Riddle has run Evolution Computing since 1977 (Evolution computing predates Autodesk, selling a product called Interact (modeled on CADDS3, which was based on Adam.) It has run continuously since then, even though Mike was a cofounder of Autodesk.)
Bob McNeel is still the ceo of McNeel Associates.
While Greg Bentley was not a founder of the company, he and his brothers Keith, Barry, Ray, and Scott are still at Bentley Systems. They're a smart and dedicated bunch of people.
I believe that Jack Dangermond is still at the helm of ESRI.
Tom Lazear is still running VersaCAD, though the company was bought by ComputerVision, and Tom had to buy it back when CV didn't know what to do with it.
I do have to admit that it's a sign of industry maturity when founders start to retire from their (still running) companies.
Posted by: Evan Yares | May 23, 2005 at 08:26 PM