About Me

Who the Heck is Steven Pratt?

…and what could he possible know about anything, that might be worth reading?

The Early Years

Steven graduated from Nido de Aguilas High School, in Santiago Chile, in December of 1978.  He was sitting on a 4-year NROTC scholarship to the University of Rochester, but it didn’t start until August of 2009. So he got a couple of jobs: he worked at the APO post office at the US Consulate on weekends, and as a Phys. Ed. assistant instructor at his high school.

He attended U of R on his NROTC scholarship, until he had to make a choice about making the military a career. Before two years were up, he could walk away from the NROTC with no obligation incurred, after two years, he was committed to 6 more years with the Navy.  As a sophomore, he opted out of the program, and switched to the University of Maryland, whose <3K annual tuition was more in line with his finances than the 20K+ that the U of R required.

Working with the Military and Local Government

From 1983 to 2008 Steven worked in a variety of computer and communications related fields, wearing a number of hats.

For 5 years, he worked for TRW at the Naval Research Lab in Anacostia, MD, and in Redondo Beach, CA.  Working mostly in Fortran, Assembly, and C language, it was a lot of that Top Secret type stuff that you can’t talk much about.  He’s a bit nostalgic about those days, when new computer programmers (they weren’t yet called software engineers) cut their teeth on maintaining and extending other people’s code. It was a great way to learn good from bad, and to understand the need for maintainability. Too bad more people today don’t start that way. During this time he also first started down the road of ’side projects’. He got his hand on Turbo Pascal, an amazing bit of software at the time, and created an extensive program to manage and track their softball league.

In 1987 Steven was on the show Concentration with Alex Trebek, and cleared the board of prizes.  With a new car, new motorcycle, new computer, and no debt - he decided to take a break from the corporate world, and go back to school, attending UMBC. With the number of credits needed to graduate finally completed, albeit in linguistics , he went back to work with computers.

A couple of years working at PRC in their Public Management Systems Emergency Dispatch, was good for a bit of travel, and in depth education about radio communications. In 1990, his good friend Warren Friedland had landed a job at Telecommunication Techniques Corporation, in Germantown Maryland, and suggested that Steven might like the place.

The Telecom Years

TTC was a perfect fit for Steven for the next 10 years. He worked developing cutting edge test equipment for the Telecommunications market, standing out on the leading edge of SONET, ATM and WDM/DWDM development during the exciting 1990’s.  He quickly climbed the technical ladder from engineer to senior engineer, then principal engineer before switching over the management side. He enjoyed working with brilliant, hard-working peers, as the company grew from 200 to 1400 employees.

During this time he developed the corporate co-op program, working closely with University of Virginia, Penn State, and Case Western, to build a pipeline of the best software engineers to maintain the corporate growth and engineering expertise.

Along with Jim McGuire, he also developed the TTC “Intrapreneuring” Initiative, with a series of small products developed on their own, after hours, including the T1-Quickmon pocket sized T1-Tester, and “The Automator” a portable product control and results capture device, that would allow a test set to be left for an extended test, monitoring and controlling the long test cycles and capturing the results.

Side projects continued with a development of a fully automated online Fantasy Football program, using PHP and mySQL. Mike Koller added the final component, the automated score updating, and the league used this software from 1996 through 2000.

International Intrigue

In 1999 Steven worked on a few side jobs, including developing some white papers and RFP responses for a series of projects in the Middle East. In 2000 he left TTC, which had just become Acterna, to form a startup to create an Arabic web portal. As the CTO of Athalon, Inc. he was responsible for all the technical elements of the web portal outside of the actual English-to-Arabic translation engine.

In 2001, after numerous false starts, it was determined that the translation engine was not ready for commercial use, and the project was ended when the primary financial backer pulled out.  Steven made a few calls, and was soon headed to Richardson, Texas to work for Wind River, in a newly created position, Field Engineering Specialist.

The Wind River Way

Wind River, the world leader in embedded real-time operating systems, had recently purchased several other companies, and they had a broad spectrum 0f middleware products, including many new communications protocols that were outside of the normal realm of their product sales.  Steven was brought into the sales fold to work with customers who started spouting 3, 4 and 5 letter acronyms which appeared as jabberwocky to many of the sales teams.

Steven worked in pre-sales, post-sales support, and paid professional services, with the middleware and complex product platforms. He also worked at trade shows, as a featured and keynote speaker, and provided class room training for the product platforms. His primary task was to do whatever the domestic sales teams needed to keep the customers happy and buying. More than a dozen awards and two promotions kept him on that track. He also worked closely with corporate marketing, to provide feedback on customer needs, and product feature requirements.

Two Roads Diverged In A Wood

In 2008 Steven left Wind River to start his own company, on the Internet. For the last several years he had untied the Gordian Knot, and had managed to get several of his sideline web projects into #1 Google organic rankings, in competitive short keywords.

His Bunco game website, BuncoRules.com had been #1 for more than 20 popular keyword phrases, including Bunco and Bunko, and he had authority listings for both. He was receiving more than 2000 new visitors a day and had developed a mailing list of 20,000 names of women interested in games, parties, drinking and eating.

He had completed his book, The Bunko Book, and now took the time to market it, selling more than 2000 copies. It’s available on Amazon and Barnes And Nobles, and continues to sell well.

His site development and promotion skills started paying dividends as he found an abundance of contracting possibilities helping improve other website’s search engine placements. He has been working with outsourcing since his Athalon days and has created the Outsource Underground membership site to help others maximize the value and minimize the initial pain of outsourcing, for everything from web design, to product development.

Recently, he has started working with a small embedded software development group, Fuel7. What started out as sales support has grown into a full-blown opportunity as VP of Sales and Business Development. It’s a great opportunity - Fuel7 has a great track record with some extremely good clients, and their specialization in TI multimedia seems to be a perfect niche with enormous potential. He’s back to wearing a lot of hats, which suits him just fine.

The Lighter Side of Steven

Steven loves travel and adventure. A scuba diver since the age of 16, he was thrilled to get his daughter Jensen PADI open water certified at the age of 11. Now that she’s 13 the depth limits have been relaxed for her, making the underwater adventure even more incredible.

A six week vacation to China and Tibet in 2006, gave him a chance to practice his rusty Mandarin. The adventure was blogged by his daughter on her website, www.JensenP.com.

Steven enjoys biking, and can be often found on his recumbent, touring the Frisco, TX area. He’s not quite the avid cyclist he once was, back when he was riding 500 mile mountainous journeys down the length of Chile (with his good friend Tom Besom), and riding a century a day along the Mount Vernon, Custis and W&OD bike trails.

Copyright Steven Pratt - The Outsourcing Insider | Powered by WordPress | Using the GreenTech Theme