Mansour A. Safai
Mansour A. Safai Memorial Fellowship Fund
Silicon Valley honors CEO Mansour Safai:
Giacomo Marini, Co-Founder of Logitech, Founder and Managing Director of Noventi, Friend of Mansour since 1987: "The software industry lost a technologist and entrepreneur of great vision, excellent technical capabilities and strong determination. He left a great mark in the software development tools industry with products always at the frontier of innovation, such as Multiscope Debugger, Symantec Visual Café, and M7 NitroX. We also lost a friend, a man of great integrity, an avid, competitive sportsman and a loving father. We are proud of having worked with and having funded Mansour. Mansour, we miss you. We will always remember you."
Pierluigi Zappacosta, Founder of Logitech and friend of Mansour for more than 15 years says “Throughout his career, Mansour’s goal was to provide exceptional development tools to the software community. M7 continued in that tradition," In areas such as interactive debugging of applications, Mansour and his teams have delivered the most innovative systems of the past decades.”
James Gosling, the creator of Java and a Sun Microsystems Inc. vice president and fellow: "Mansour led the development of Symantec Cafe, the first Java IDE.His list of accomplishments is long, and his impact was large. He will be missed."
Read full blog here.
Adam Bosworth, a coding guru and industry legend, now vice president of Engineering at Google Inc. said "I met Mansour about three years ago. I immediately recognized the vision and drive and love of building beautiful things I've always cherished in my co-workers. In addition, I saw a real human -- decent, earnest, caring, and someone I would love to work with as a human being. I did my best to buy his company, M7, but Alfred [Chuang, CEO of BEA Systems] turned it down at that time."
Zack Urlocker, Vice President of marketing at MySQL Inc., who spent several years as an executive at Borland competing with Mansour, said, "Mansour was very private … so he was perhaps not as well-known as other guys in the tools space, but he was deeply admired and respected by all those who worked with him." Urlocker praised Safai’s latest effort. "The M7 team was truly gifted," he said. "The goal of simplifying Java development from top to bottom was perhaps overly ambitious. Mansour eventually refocused the team to target the emerging open-source standards such as Struts, Hibernate and JSP [JavaServer Pages] servlets. What emerged was NitroX, an elegant development environment for building Web-based applications with the full power of Java." “Even though we were competitors, we respected what Mansour and his teams were building at Symantec, and even more to the point, Mansour led a tremendous victory with coming out with Visual Café,” said Zack Urlocker, vice president of marketing at MySQL, former Borland executive and friend of Safai for 10 years.
Read full blog here.
David Intersimone, Vice President of Developer Relations at Borland Software Corp. said "We may have been competitors at times, but Mansour was always a professional and a gentleman. His impact in the development industry has been long and deep, heading the development of industry-leading (and changing) products including the Multiscope Debugger, Symantec Visual Cafe and M7 NitroX. Because we were both in the developer tools business we would meet at different conferences and several times we appeared on the same panel discussion sessions. In our very competitive space, we always celebrated the uniqueness of developers working on products for developers."
Read full blog here.
Gordon Eubanks, who was CEO of Symantec when Safai worked there, said, "What I remember most clearly about Mansour is he had the ability to look into the future and always was driven to where he saw the industry going next."
Gene Wang, president of Bitfone Corp., who was executive vice president at Symantec when Safai worked there, said, "Mansour was a software genius. … Symantec also purchased OPTLINK, created by the amazing Steve Russell, Zortech, the brainchild of the brilliant Walter Bright and THINK, the world-leading Macintosh development tools. Mansour headed all of these groups and worked relentlessly to forge a unified whole from these diamonds in the rough."
In addition, "Mansour and his team created Symantec C++, a great product that was set back by bugs as well as tough competition from Borland and Microsoft. So Mansour pushed for a new direction and created the industry-leading Java tool for Windows, Visual Café. This was a huge success until it was sold off to BEA, based on Symantec's focus on the security space."
Ted Schlein, a partner with the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who also worked with Wang at Symantec, said Safai was the first person to introduce him to Java, "which I then continued focusing on with the Java Fund at KPCB." Schlein called Safai "a visionary in the development tools market. He saw where things were headed many years before anyone else. He hired the best technologists and led them with his passion and persistence. … Mansour was that wonderful mixture of talent, passion, self awareness and humanity."
Darryl Taft writes in e-week: "Mansour Safai’s legacy is strong in the industry. He created the most successful stand-alone debugger of the 1980s, Multiscope; the Symantec C++ family of development tools; Visual Café, the first Java IDE (integrated development environment); and, most recently, M7’s visual development environment. I met Mansour several years ago when he was at Symantec -– back when they were a force in the tools business. The first thing I could tell about him was that he loved technology. He loved his work, and he wanted to help you get the story right. He was a teacher as much as a source. Whenever I’d see him at conferences he’d take time to spell out not only Symantec’s products and strategy, but the products and strategies of all the vendors in the space. He always had time, particularly for a self-proclaimed night owl East Coast reporter who was often up late (even by West Coast standards) e-mailing or calling with questions. Years later, when Mansour set out to launch his most recent venture, M7, which BEA Systems Inc. acquired late last year, he called me late one night to give me the scoop -- and apologized for the hour despite my insistence that he call whenever he got in. Another thing I remember about Mansour was that as much as he loved to compete and see his products do well in the market, he never dissed his competitors."
Natalie Itin from SD Times software development writes "Mansour Safai was a software engineer and executive at several companies, most notably Logitech, Symantec and M7. He was widely considered one of the industry leaders in creating and developing software development tools. Mansour created the popular Multiscope debugger while a senior software engineer at Logitech. Multiscope was spun out into its own company and then bought out by Symantec. At Symantec, he was vice president and general manager of the language and Internet tools division. In 1997, he developed Visual Café, a multiplatform RAD tool for writing, debugging and deploying Java applets and applications that work with relational databases, making Java accessible to a larger audience. It won several prestigious awards. WebGain, a start-up funded by BEA and Warburg Pincus Ventures, purchased Visual Café from Symantec in late 1999. At that time, Safai struck off on his own to launch M7, which focused on simplifying J2EE development. One of his accomplishments was NitroX, a suite of Web application development tools.
Essam Zaky, Co-Founder of M7 says:
“I was lucky and privileged to meet Mansour in 1996. Since then, he became my best friend, and profoundly impacted my personal and professional life.
Mansour was an exceptional human being.
He was a resolute fighter. If he was a soldier, he would never leave the battle ground, no matter how fierce it is, until he gets the victory. In the few years following 2000, times were difficult for startup companies, and many of them just disappeared. M7 did not, only because of his spirit. It is an interesting coincidence that Mansour actually means Victorious in Persian.
He was strong. No matter how much stress and pressure, he was always calm, rational, in control, and with a great balance of logic and emotions. He kept his energy and spirit up to the last minute, even with all what he was going thru.
He was smart. I worked closely with Mansour in different situations, and it’s a wonder how advanced he was in so many different things such as Accounting, Marketing, Business Development, Business Law, Software Architecture, Computer Hardware, Music and Video Games. He often appeared more knowledgeable in these things than the dedicated professionals.
He was a visionary. Mansour really changed an industry with his vision and pioneering work in Multiscope, Symantec and M7. One can’t find a case throughout his career, where he did something ordinary.
He was trustworthy and caring. Mansour cared a lot about people. In many situations he put people’s interest before his own. He was a person you can truly trust and rely on.
He was multi cultural. When I first met Mansour, it was clear that he was raised in France. When I came to know him better, it was also clear that he is very Persian, and very American. Some of you might be surprised to know that English was his third language.
Mansour, my friend, I miss your energy and smile. You will always be in my heart.”