Rob Burgess

 Another stalwart falls.   Rob Burgess died just before Christmas, at a mere 68 years old.   Known perhaps best in Canada, Rob was a great intrapreneur, known throughout the computer graphics industry.    About the time that I joined Silicon Graphics (albeit very briefly) in 1984, Rob was hired as SGI's first Canadian employee.   He eventually set up SGI-Canada, and then rose to executive ranks by 1990, moving to Silicon Valley.   He soon returned to Toronto however, to take over Alias Research, which was floundering in the computer graphics tools market.   Leading a resurgence, he piloted them to a merger with Wavefront in Santa Barbara, and then to an acquisition by SGI in 1995.   Alias had invented Maya along the way, the leading animation program for movie making.  We used that extensively at Cogswell College for our movies.

Two years later, he was recruited to lead a turn-around for Macromedia, replacing Bud Colligan as CEO.  It was very successful, and that led to an acquisition by Adobe, where Rob served for years on their Board.  He also served fifteen years on the Nvidia board, as they continued their industry -leading graphics chips.

I first met Rob in Santa Barbara when he was competing with, and occasionally partnering with, the Wavefront team.   Doug Chance saw a primitive Office WorkStation from a fledgling company, Santa Barbara Labs (or something like that name), which built a dual station system for an executive and his assistant, which could swap files (not by email, but by walk-mail).  Doug, VP for computing at HP at the time bought shares in the company for HP, and got two sets of workstations to 'play with.'   I volunteered to be one of the two users, with my associate Judy Grenard while running Corporate Engineering in HP"s building 26 (DeerCreek).   It was a great system, even though primitive.   Our conclusion though was that most executives would deign such a system--they much preferred to talk to their associate than to send them floppy discs or tape cassettes.  The company died soon thereafter, but in the meantime, I got to Santa Barbara and for some reason met Wavefront and Rob.   Smart, affable, visionary--quite a combination.

When I took the CEO job at Spectron Microsystems in Santa Barbara some 10 years later, I commuted from the San Jose airport weekly.   Two constant companions on the plane were Bay area executives working in Santa Barbara--one for Alias-Wavefront, which had been merged by then under Rob and sold to SGI, and the other was a small division of networking company Stratacom, about to be bought by Cisco.  We'd trade stories weekly, and the two leaders who were most often mentioned were John Chambers at Cisco, even though Morgridge was still CEO, and Rob Burgess.   Fascinating stories.  And Rob was admired by his associate, even more than Chambers by his.

Here's the obituary for Rob, as printed in the San Jose Mercury-News today

Robert Kenneth Burgess
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