Jared Reimer

I'm an engineer first. I started at the University of Washington at seventeen and finished a master's in computer science and engineering at the Paul G. Allen School, a program that has ranked among the top five in the country, while helping run one of Seattle's first internet providers. I would not recommend doing both at once, but it was the best education I could have had. 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 part came from being asked. At oz.net I was a customer at seventeen, then the systems administrator, then VP of Operations, and I led its sale to The River. At The River I architected the integration of the ISPs it kept acquiring into one system, which let customers keep their email addresses and passwords when every other roll-up of the era made them start over. When the board fired the CEO and asked me to take over a company that was effectively insolvent, we settled with our largest creditor, turned it around, and sold the business to a public company. Then I founded Cascadeo, was its CTO for eighteen years and its CEO whenever it needed one, ran the P&L for most of its life, and sold it in 2020. That is three exits, with a seat on both sides of the table along the way. Most of what I know about M&A I learned on the integration side, keeping customers and staff through the changes.

I still build. PURPLE is the University of Washington's AI platform. I am its primary architect, and I led it from a prototype through pilot, procurement and launch to full production for 100,000+ people in under two years. PURPLE Studio, an agent that builds other agents, is in full production across the University; I designed it and built it with Claude Code, and the student assistants I work with test it and teach others to use it. Before that came Cascadeo AI in 2023, which put large language models into live operations and helpdesk ticketing; nest.com on its launch day; CenturyLink Cloud's monitoring across 20 data centers; and, at oz.net, flat-rate dial-up for twenty dollars a month when everyone else charged by the hour.

Mostly, though, the work has been finding and developing exceptional talent worldwide. At Cascadeo we hired hundreds, almost all engineers, most of them in Manila and in rural Legaspi, and trained many of them from the ground up. We went where the talent was.

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 and let me build. I try to pay that forward, with the student assistants I work with now and with the people who started their careers at Cascadeo, many of whom I still count as dear 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 1,200 agents on it. My favorites solve small, everyday problems that would never have been funded as projects.

Most of my own building time goes into two parts of the platform. PURPLE Studio, an agent that helps people build other agents, is now in full production across the University. PURPLE Connect, which brings help-desk support into PURPLE, is still in alpha. 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.