Entrepreneurs - Searching for Scottie Pippen

Scotty Pippen was undoubtedly the greatest straight man in the history of professional sports.   He was a superstar - but with a Michael Jordan to lead the enterprise - his teams would be champions.  Scottie Pippen was every bit the equal of Dean Martin (Martin & Lewis), George Burns (Burns and Allen).   He was brilliant, restless, and people-centric.   Mr. Pippen led three different NBA teams to the playoffs, but he would be remembered as MJ's straight man with the Chicago Bulls.

With due diligence, the History of a Safer World, a story of entrepreneurs, sought out the Scottie Pippen of Orange County startups.  His name is Phil Huber.   He excelled at a string of startups from co-founder to chief technologist.  Like Benjamin Franklin, Mr. Huber can't seem to keep still.  His present job is serving as straight man to Rick Bullotta, founder of Thingworx, a technology company based in Philadelphia.  Phil was also co-founder of Alteer, working with Jim White.  But, like Mr. Pippen, Phil will be known for the championship years at Wonderware - playing straight man to the mercurial Dennis Morin 1989-1995.

Phil is often referred to as the youngest guy in the room - for the past 30 years!   Working with brilliant companies just after college (Bell Labs), he migrated to Southern California in the early 1980's, quickly assuming software development manager positions at Orange country startups.  By 1984, he was managing the software team at Triconex.  His team included a staff engineer named Dennis Morin, already known (and perhaps tolerated for the eccentricity) for tinkering on Apple inspired graphical interface machines.  At the time, Triconex has a development path for a product called Tri-View.  The product would later have a future - but not with hardware focused safety systems company.

"We were talking baseball statistics at the water cooler and Phil was holding up his end of the conversation - all the time he was at his PC typing about 146 wpm of Mozart-esque code that would be the centerpiece of our next release!"  Mike McCulty
"Now Norm, whatever you do, don't touch those espresso machines!"  Phil Huber to Wonderware Controller Norm Farquhar looking to cut costs

"We needed an program that would allow applications to be shared across networks - a few weeks later Phil delivered NetDDE - a key milestone in Wonderware's growth and solidified our relationship with Microsoft."  Dennis Morin