I didn’t have a roadmap. I had curiosity, a keyboard, and a willingness to stay up all night figuring it out — and that’s still pretty much how I work.
Still playing in the sandbox
The sandbox is the honest picture of how John works. The toys have changed; the habit has not. The machines in the sand are the real ones his Webspinner work runs on: a Mac Studio, two EdgeXpert computers, a router and a drive, in Portland, Oregon, not in someone else’s cloud. The screen on the tree shows the Inference Desktop: Create your AI, and own it.
How it started
He taught himself to program at sixteen, on a Burroughs B-1900, with manuals and midnight oil. His first technology job was the night shift at Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. He studied technology and philosophy at TCU, and founded PC Company in 1986, before he graduated.
In 1989 he built CGL, a fourth-generation language that generated complete C applications for Unix, and founded The Open Systems Group on it, in his garage. It made the Inc. 500 in 1996, at number 127. Later came Para-Docs Software, Red Hat from 2012 to 2017, and, since 2020, enterprise AI-SDLC transformation as a Principal at Cognizant. The full career is on the home page.
Full circle
In 2024 he came back to what brought him into technology in the first place, the joy of invention, and started Webspinner. He founded the Webspinner Foundation on a simple view: the surest way to see artificial intelligence used well is for ordinary people to own theirs outright rather than rent it.
I’ve spent 45 years watching technology separate the people who understand it from those who don’t. I’d like to spend the next chapter changing that.