Robin Haberman

I grew up on a college campus. I graduated from a private high school housed at Reed College and staffed by students from Reed. My training is in high-tech and multicultural organizations. Degrees with an international focus: international relations, international trade followed by a BA in business and management and 2 certificates in telecom and info management. I also have over 10,000 hours of professional training which gave me the skills and capabilities needed to work with 2 multinational and 3 foreign corporations in information technology. This also included 3 overseas training assignments. The focus of my training has been to thrive in multinational, multicultural environments while working in information management systems.

Years ago, I had the pleasure of working for Atlas Telecom when it was an unknown startup. I began as a graveyard-shift operator, but within the first 2 years found myself saying goodbye to first my supervisor and then to the Network Manager. As each left, I found my job role growing. Soon I became the Network and Systems Admin for one of Atlas's first international commercial carrier networks operating twenty-four hours a day. It was like giving a little kid a toy train set at Christmas, it was always in motion. I worked for Atlas for 11 years total, during 7 of which I managed one network and helped out on others. In later years I moved around in a number of job roles, producing internal support documentation on the side. Only later did I start to understand the lessons I learned there.

The interesting thing about Atlas was the products / services they offered to customers at different levels, and the way they moved across multiple domains at different entry points to offer a new solution to the old problem of moving information around the world. Their view of innovation led to the undoing of many developed marketplaces with well-entrenched vendors and dominant players. The project I am doing now is not so much about moving message traffic around the world as it is to supply those who mine information about the Earth with new tools and platforms. As with Atlas, this involves both a simple view of innovation and the use of commodity computing resources to create complex platforms. And, most critically, it involves going after a target market that no one else sees: the people trying to mine information about the Earth for climate change.