Jared Reimer

I am a senior technology executive, and an engineer first and foremost. At seventeen I started at the University of Washington, and went on to finish a master's in computer science and engineering at the Paul G. Allen School while helping run one of Seattle's first internet providers. Many would not recommend doing both at once, but it was the best education I could have hoped for: the classroom explained how everything worked, and the ISP showed me what it takes to keep it running for people who are paying for it.

The executive roles came from being asked. At oz.net I went from customer to VP of Operations and led its sale to The River, where I merged the ISPs it kept acquiring into one system without making customers give up their email addresses. When The River's board needed someone to take over a company in trouble, we settled with our largest creditor, turned it around and sold it to a public company. After The River I took a break to travel the world, and started Cascadeo remotely from a backpack and a satellite terminal while diving off the grid in the Philippines. I was its CTO for eighteen years and sold it in 2020. Most of what I know about M&A I learned on the integration side, keeping customers and staff through the changes.

Today I am the primary architect of PURPLE, the University of Washington's AI platform, which went from prototype to full production for 100,000+ people in under two years, built by a UWIT team with student assistants and University leadership behind it.

Much of the work has been finding and developing people. At Cascadeo we hired hundreds of engineers, most of them in Manila and Legaspi, and trained many from the ground up.

A lot of it happened because someone took a chance on me: oz.net let a seventeen-year-old customer run its servers, The River's board handed me a company in trouble, and the University of Washington created a role that had never existed. I try to pay that forward, with the student assistants I work with now and the people who started their careers at Cascadeo, many of whom are still friends.

PURPLE has been open to the whole University of Washington since July, and the interesting work has moved from launch to use. People across UW have built more than 1,300 agents on it. My favorites solve small, everyday problems that would never have been funded as projects.

I still build nearly every day.

Cascadeo was hundreds of engineers in Manila, Legaspi and Seattle, and the leaders who ran the company with me. The clients on this page trusted those teams. PURPLE is a UWIT team, the student assistants who test it and teach others to use it, partners at Cloudforce and Microsoft, and University leadership that backed a fixed budget for three years and let the work proceed. The Seattle Internet Exchange is its member networks and two decades of volunteer board members who kept it free.