How different is being a researcher, with a novel idea you want to introduce to the world, to being an entrepreneur, with a novel idea you want to introduce to the world? How have the great ideas in Computer Science spread throughout history, and how does that compare to how the most successful companies and products have been built and sold? If "marketing" is a dirty word amongst software engineers, who prefer to consider themselves pure problem solvers, what is the Academic view on the same issue? This talk will examine these questions from the perspective of a software marketing professional with a penchant for amateur Computer Science -- in other words, a perspective you might not be used to.
Michael R. Bernstein is the co-founder of Reify, a boutique marketing agency that works exclusively with software companies. Prior to working with over 100 clients in the last seven years in that role, he was an engineer and engineering manager for more than five years, where he became known for digging deep into the ghosts of ideas past via reading and discussing many academic papers, and a computer science educator prior to that. He hopes to bring his unique perspective on industry, academia, and the commercialization of software to the table in order to provoke deep questions for all of Causal Islands attendees.
