Geoff Perlman

Geoff Perlman (born January 6, 1964) is an American entrepreneur and author whose vision for cross-platform development tools has growing impact for developing applications on different operating systems. His interest in cross-platform compatibility surfaced at an early age during exposure to technology at the local university. Carrying this passion with him throughout his life he has founded companies to allow ordinary people to create extraordinary things with computer software. Perlman has worked for a number of technology companies in his career, including AT&T and 4D, and he founded development tools company, Real Software, in 1996.
Early life and education
Perlman was born to a large, native-southern Californian family on January 6, 1964. The son of an electrical engineer who designed communications equipment for military purposes and a social worker, Perlman attended University High School in Irvine, California. Perlman first became interested in programming at age 10 while watching Star Trek and learning about the technology of the future. To feed this interest Perlman spent time at the University of California at Irvine computer science lab learning about mainframe computers. A few years later Perlman’s father brought home a Texas Instruments portable terminal that allowed him to further develop his programming skills.
Early career
In 1984, Perlman took a job as a customer service/billing technician at AT&T in an office that housed approximately 300 employees. The office phone system reported the number of calls each employee would take per hour and staff managers reviewed this information on a weekly basis and compared it to employee’s seniority to determine when lunches and breaks would be allotted. Perlman went to his manager and suggested he could write a program to automate this process; something that took each manager a full day per week to do—his program would reduce the task to 15 minutes. He was given an office and a computer to build this application.
In 1986, he was hired by Stephen Douglas (Redhead Encyclopedia, Successclick.com) to fix the database of Video Guide Magazine, listing thousands of movies for rent and purchase. From there, he worked with Douglas on building his own design group and working on database programming as a consultant. Perlman then exceeded in this area and was hired by 4th Dimension (ACIUS) and was considered an expert for Macintosh database design.
Career
Using his knowledge of database design, he has spent most of his career working for companies he founded, although midway through his rise up in the tech world, he worked in Silicon Valley for 4D (then ACIUS) from 1990 to 1994. He was hired to conduct training classes across the US teaching users how to develop database applications using 4D and its programming language. Initially he was the only trainer the company employed. He quickly grew the department, hiring three additional trainers and quadrupled the training revenue.
Founding Real Software
Perlman founded development tools company, Real Software, in 1996. At the time there was nothing like Visual Basic for the Mac. Realbasic (now Real Studio), Real Software’s flagship product, was meant to offer the flexibility of Visual Basic to Mac users while offering them an integrated drag and drop user interface builder. It was clear to Perlman that cross-platform development was the way of the future with the increasing marketshare of Mac and Linux. Realbasic quickly released the option to cross-compile applications for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux, making it the only true cross-platform development tool on the market at the time.
Perlman continues to serve as the CEO of Real Software (Now Xojo) where they recently released Real Studio Web Edition, which is one way to develop powerful, modern web applications without the need to learn multiple programming languages. Web Apps written with Real Studio Web Edition are also running in modern Browsers of Mobile Operating Systems like iOS and Android.
On June 4, 2013 Real Software announced they were changing the name of the company to Xojo, Inc. and the product to Xojo. Under the new brand, Perlman will continue on his promise of enabling ordinary people to create extraordinary apps.
Publications
Perlman is the author of Inside 4th Dimension, which was published by SYBEX in 1993. This book describes the basics of database management including creating files, new features that were included in the old 4th Dimension product, and building an introductory database for custom applications.
Perlman has written articles about development tools published in Dr. Dobb's Journal, VentureBeat and SD Times.
Personal life
Perlman currently resides in Austin, TX, with his wife and two children.

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