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Sarah Allen Joins Balsamiq's Board of Advisers

Sometimes I wonder what I did to get so lucky in life. This is one of those moments. Sarah Allen has agreed to join Balsamiq's already star-studded Board of Advisers.

sarahallen

Who is Sarah Allen? I am frankly very surprised no-one has written a Wikipedia page about her (yet?), so here's a snippet from her bio:

Sarah has been developing commercial software since 1990. She began focusing on Internet software as an engineer on Macromedia's Shockwave team in 1995. She led the development of the Shockwave Multiuser Server, and later the Flash Media Server, introducing streaming video and multi-party communication in Flash Player 6. She has also developed software tools for multimedia, digital video, and graphic arts at Adobe, Aldus, and The Company of Science and Art (After Effects). She was named one of the top 25 women of the web by SF Wow (San Francisco Women of the Web) in 1998.

In other words, she rocks. Hard.

Sarah was my boss at Macromedia at the beginning of my career, and since then she's been one of the people I look up to the most, both professionally and as a person. I have learned so much from her and I am so excited to be able to be able to continue do so in the future, I missed her! 🙂

As she announced today, Sarah is currently 'going solo' after almost 6 years of leadership at Laszlo Systems. I suspect it won't take long for some exciting startup to snag her as CTO (and they should be so lucky!), so I suggest you take advantage of this rare moment and do whatever you can to get her to help your team with whatever software problem you're facing!

Please join me in welcoming Sarah to the Balsamiq World! 🙂

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

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Comments (3)

  1. Congrats, Sarah is awesome. I worked with her for a bit at Macromedia. I first met her in early 1992, when she flew out to the bay area to pitch her video tech the PACo Player, in a pre-quicktime world!

  2. I really love reading your blog, it’s a fantastic resource.

    I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about your Board of Advisers? How did you choose them, was there a process of finding people with different skills, experience etc? Were these people all friends or colleagues or did you specifically ask people that you didn’t know with certain skills? How do you interact with them? Do you have an online meeting, or is it all one on one with each? Do you send monthly reports or quarterly or maybe just use your blog?

    I think that a Board of Advisers would be a valuable tool for you and anyone, and I’d love to know how it works with your business.

    Great blog and product, keep up the good work.

  3. ah, two of my faves, very cool…. 🙂

    jd