Jeff Ayars

Nothing like a High School reunion to make you feel older or a writing assignment to make me procrastinate. Thanks to Tana and Wendy and everyone else involved in the web site, I've spent hours reading and browsing. It's been 5 years since I've been back to Los Alamos and it just wasn't in the cards for me to make the reunion this year with work and family schedules. Pardon me if I'm a bit long winded but here goes.

After graduation I headed up to Tacoma, WA to attend the University of Puget Sound. To this day I'm still not 100% sure how I found out about that school but it was a great place to spend 4 years and I fell in love with two things - the Puget Sound region and my wife Kim and I've been with both of them ever since. I went to collage intending to be a History major having been inspired by Mr. Brinsko's classes but I quickly figured out that History majors did a lot of reading and writing - two things I'm not very speedy at - and Computer Science and Math came a lot easier for me. Why fight it I though and switched majors.

I joined the Crew team as a coxswain racing in both men's 8's and 4's and women's 4's. That got me off campus 6 days a week (mornings at 5 AM but you get used to that) and some pretty fun weekends traveling around the Northwest and down the coast to California racing other small schools and occasionally the Pac 10 schools at Pacific Coast Rowing Championships or San Diego Crew Classic. It was on the Crew team my sophomore year I met Kim when she joined the team as a novice. I thought she was cute the very first time I saw her. We didn't start dating until two years later when we ended up taking theory of probability and algorithms and data structures together.

I took my junior year off to do a 10 month co-op at Microsoft and ended up doing phone support for Windows 3.0 and DOS 5 and writing my first (well second, the first was the swimming lesson registration program I used at Canyon Vista Pool) software program, Icon Magic, an icon editor for Windows 3.0. It got a write up in a magazine and made me $75 dollars ($15 at a time) as shareware. I was hooked and knew I wanted to be a software developer after graduation.

After graduation I took a job at Asymetrix - the company Paul Allen founded after leaving Microsoft - in their developer support department and moved to Bellevue, a short 3 miles from the office. With Kim still at UPS it was a lot of commuting between Bellevue and Tacoma (45 miles) on weekends. I had my Nissan Sentra, gas was like $1.40 a gallon and I thought I was spending a lot of $$ on it, if I'd only stockpiled some. When Kim graduated and moved a little north to Federal Way, I moved there too so we'd be in the same town. Kim and I were married in 1994 and bought our first house in Federal Way (right behind Wild Waves water park if you know the area) and got our first dog, a shepard mix named Cory. My mom really wanted a grand child but I told her we wanted to make sure we could raise a dog together first. A year later we got Cinder, a husky mix, further disappointing my mother. Kim was feeling the academic itch and wanted to get her masters and as she started researching programs I got inspired as well so in 1995 we both enrolled in the Masters of Software Engineer program at Seattle University which we completed in 1998.

In 1996 after 1 year in support and 3 years as a software developer at Asymetrix, I took a job at RealNetworks, Inc, where my assignment was to add Video to the RealPlayer. It was my first "start-up" experience but I really enjoyed it. It was all it was supposed to be - programming for days straight without sleep, shipping really cool software that did things nobody else had done before, a David vs Goliath competition with a big company (Microsoft) and an IPO. Being part of growing the company from 100 people to 1500 people and from start-up to public company was an exciting, fun, and rewarding experience.

In 1999 Kim and I had the opportunity to go to India to attend the wedding of a friend of ours. Neither of us had passports. We went with 10 other friends from RealNetworks and spent two weeks touring northern India and Nepal with the wedding in the middle. India is quite a place to go for your first trip out of the US (not counting Canada). We had to take a plane trip in Nepal to see Mt Everest due to the pollution in the valleys around Kathmandu. With a shiny new passport in hand I started regular international travel for RealNetworks. In the next few years I traveled to France, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Finland, Denmark, Japan, South Korea, China, and India speaking at conferences, doing business deals, and working on international standards for streaming media.

In 2005 after 9 years working my way up the ranks I got promoted to Vice President at RealNetworks running product development for 5 of their products. Managing a team of 120 people building software for cell phones and data centers was a great experience as was being part of a few international acquisitions but I began to miss working on smaller teams and the simplicity of focus of a start-up with one product so last September I left RealNetworks and joined a start-up founded by a friend of mine as one of 3 employees. That lasted for 6 months we where we launched the first product, a fitness web site - sweat365.com, but it never got funded so I had to look for something else (the company is still going, just without me). Starting a company takes guts but getting strangers to give you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars is harder by far. In April I took the job of Vice President of Engineering at Pelago, Inc. (www.pelago.com) in Seattle. One product and 20 employees to manage lets me be much more hands on and I really like that.

In 2000 Kim and I moved to North Bend, 30 miles east of Seattle on I-90 and started riding horses at a local barn. Settled in our new 'foot hill' community we decided we were ready to start our family and in 2001 we had our first daughter Veronica. At that time we planned 3 years between her and her next sibling but in a short two years the "baby envy" was strong and we had our second daughter Samantha. I'm sure I'm not alone in the long string experiences dealing with my children where the light goes on and I finally understand the logic of something my parents did or said, perhaps that state of being "over tired". Veronica's just finished first grade and Samantha cannot wait for kindergarten. Both girls are dancing ballet and doing gymnastics (right in front of me as I type this ) and have me wrapped around their little fingers. We still have Cory and Cinder (both getting pretty old, stiff, and hard of hearing) with us and have added a number of hermit crabs and a horse to the family in recent years.

When I'm not playing with my girls or working (back at a start-up) I spend my time riding my road bike around the rural roads of east King county. I regularly see deer, elk, and rabbits on my rides and can get similar elevation gains as riding the 'loop' in Los Alamos, around a base of 450 feet instead of 7500 feet thought.

I am really enjoying reading the other bios and remembering times in elementary, junior high, or high school with each one. Los Alamos will always be a special place to me, I still list it as my home town.

If you want to know more or just keep in touch, drop me a line, jeff_ayars@yahoo.com, or find me on facebook (the Seattle Jeff Ayars).