steveshepard.com

About

The Official Bio

Steve Shepard is the owner of Storyist Software LLC, a software company that develops tools for writers. A night and weekend writer for many years, he took a year off in 2002 to finish a novel. Not finding the writing tools he wanted, he decided to create them. And so Storyist Software was born.

Before founding Storyist, he served as Vice President of Applications Infrastructure at Liberate Technologies where he managed the development and deployment of set-top box middleware and applications.

Prior to Liberate, Steve held various technical positions at Silicon Graphics, where he was a member of the Nintendo 64 design team, and Apple Computer. He started his career as an engineer at New England Digital, a maker of high-end recording studio equipment.

Steve received a B.S. in Engineering and Music from the University of Hartford and an M.S.E.E from Stanford University. He holds two United States patents.

The Rest of the Story

I was born in Connecticut in 1965. My father owned the town department store, a business which had been in the family for generations, and was active in town politics. My mother stayed home to raise my four brothers and I, and later went on to earn an MBA and climb the ladder in the insurance industry.

I attended South Windsor High, spending as much time with the drama club, jazz band, choir and orchestra as I did on my science and english assignments. Blessed with tolerant (or deaf) neighbors, my oldest brother and I started several garage bands that went on to play at school dances, graduation parties, and eventually the biggest prize of all–the local roller skating rink.

I enrolled at the University of Hartford in a program that allowed me to study both engineering and music and afterwards, in 1987, landed a job designing recording studio equipment at a company in Vermont that counted Sting, Michael Jackson, and Pat Metheney as customers.

Apple lured me to California in 1991 to work on digital signal processing projects, and it was then that I started attending Stanford part time to persue my MSEE. In 1993, I moved to Silicon Graphics (SGI) to work on a pet project of Jim Clark’s–interactive television. About this time, I met my lovely wife Christina, then an editor in the technical publications department, now the full-time mother of our son David.

At SGI, I also had the great privilege of working on the Nintendo 64 design team through a SGI/Nintendo joint venture. When that shipped in 1996, I and several team members left to join a spin out of newly-public Netscape Communications called Navio Communictations. A merger, IPO, and several promotions later, I left what had then become Liberate Technologies to start my current venture–Storyist Software.

And that brings us up to date.