Carl Erickson

I co-founded Atomic Object in the summer of 2001 with Bill Bereza, one of my former students at Grand Valley State University. Atomic rose from the ashes of a dot-com startup where I had been VP of Engineering for a year. When that company failed to get a second round of funding, it went under and left us with some office furniture, three interns, the remainder of a lease, and a missing final month's pay. We still use the office furniture, two of those three interns are significant owners of the company today, and I long since stopped missing the $10,000.

The failure of that startup made two very strong impressions on me:

1. build software for the actual needs of real people, and
2. agile practices will change the software development world.

I gradually moved from programming on a daily basis to running the operations of our Grand Rapids office. Since January 2014, Shawn Crowley and Mike Marsiglia have taken over operations and client engagements for Grand Rapids. I took the title of CEO and started working on things with longer time horizons, like speculative development investments, marketing, and growing our Ann Arbor office.

I'm an active angel investor, a member and director of Grand Angels, a board member and co-founder of Blue Medora, and an advisory board member for Local Orbit. I've served on the boards of Varsity News Network, and Mock Draft Central (acquired). I serve on the investment committee for Invest Michigan!, and I'm a managing director for Tappan Hill Ventures.

I maintain my own blog, Great Not Big, where I share ideas about building and running an innovation services company, and regularly guest blog for Crain's Detroit.

Living our Teach and Learn value mantra through writing no doubt comes from my first career as a Professor of Computer Science at Grand Valley State University (1991-2001), where I taught courses on networking, operating systems, architecture, and object technology. I extended my professorial duties through 2009, and rediscovered my Swedish heritage, as a part-time industrial lecturer at Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden where I taught a course entitled "Software Craftsmanship."

I founded the non-profit trade association SoftwareGR in 2003. I also served on the board of the Swedish American Heritage Society for over 6 years, some of that time as its President.

I have a B.S. in electrical engineering from Purdue University (1985) and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer engineering from Michigan State University (1991).

On a personal level, I sail a Snipe at the Grand Rapids Yacht Club, enjoy owning interesting cars, love to snowboard and play Swedish floor ball in the winter.