The Orchard Group: Rob Rosen

With 30 years of IT experience and 20 of those years as an entrepreneur, Rob has a unique combination of business, IT strategy and technology skills.

Rob co-founded Resource Control Systems, where he designed and implemented cost-accounting simulation and a Box-Jenkins time series forecasting applications for mainframe and minicomputer systems (System 370, DEC VAX, and NCR) and then for the IBM PC. By taking Department of Defense public domain research in automated theorem proving, he created the Solver. This technology was developed in C using the rules of algebra and successive numerical approximation to perform nonlinear optimization and to rewrite systems of equations for spreadsheet backsolving. After selling the Solver to Lotus Development Corporation for over $8 million, he joined the company and managed over 100 programmers who developed graphical spreadsheet products for Windows and OS/2. Rob received two patents, one for the Solver technology and one for an innovative user interface technique that maps familiar keystroke sequences into a graphical user interface gestures.

In 1991, Rob co-founded Vertigo Development Corporation. As the Vice President of Development and Chief Technology Officer, he designed and developed a unique technology to create a powerful authoring environment for decision support CD-ROM products. The system, written in C++, was used by Intuit to create components of the first two CD-ROM versions of Quicken, as well as, Standard & Poor's, Fidelity Investments, Dow Jones, Houghton Mifflin, New England Business Services, The Learning Company, and Advanta. In 1993, he became the CEO of Vertigo where Rob raised $20 million in venture financing and grew the revenues of the business from zero to approximately $5 million/year.

Most recently, Rob co-founded and became the CEO of Event Zero, an IT services company focused on startups and financial services organizations. He grew the company to 200 employees; opened offices in Boston and New York; and raised $33.75 million in two rounds of venture financing. Event Zero clients included: Barnes & Noble, National Cooperative Bank, E*Trade, New River, Everbank.com, CBS Payroll, BankPass, Debtz, Atlantic Data Systems, Cisco, Dupont and Sterling Commerce.

Rob holds an MBA with a specialization in Information Technology and Finance from the University of Chicago and a BA in Economics with Honors from Swarthmore College.

You can email Rob at rrosen@theorchardgroup.net.