Elemental Technologies is one of Portland’s biggest start-up successes. Founded in 2006 by Sam, Brian, and Jesse, Elemental was acquired for a reported $287M nine years later by AWS Elemental, an Amazon Web Services company. But on the way there, they learned a lot about start-ups and would say some things worked out really well but they would have done some things differently, too. Come hear Jesse speak about lessons learned, and tell a few stories of the journey.

Jesse brings a deep background in video systems and software to AWS Elemental where he leads the software and applications developments teams. As a software applications engineer at Pixelworks, he played a critical role in bringing numerous complex customer designs into production. Jesse was a core architect for the clean-slate development of Pixelworks' next-generation System Development Kit (SDK), the real-time operating system that powers all Pixelworks ImageProcessor ICs. He managed and contributed to many successful products at Pixelworks, including the digital television SDK that drives all Pixelworks-based digital televisions today. Prior to Pixelworks, Jesse held software engineering positions at Qualcomm and Ericsson. He earned a B.S. in computer science from the University of Colorado, Boulder and has been recognized by the Portland Business Journal as one of forty outstanding leaders under forty. Jesse enjoys spending his free time exploring rivers and mountains and is at home in the elements.