User:Raiteria

Ashley Raiteri is a tech executive with a biz dev and product focus. Most recently, he was the founding CTO of Everbread (along with Morten Lund, CEO, and Assen Vassilev, VP of Strategy. Everbread is a travel technology company that developed a proprietary fares and pricing search engine rivaling ITA and Amedeus. The initial product was built in only 6 months in a code boot camp hosted in Mallorca. Ashley began his career as a rocket scientist on complex system-of-system projects for the United States Defense and Aerospace Industry. He has led teams of hundreds of developers and worked as Senior Architect or Project Manager on mind-bogglingly complex military and aerospace systems. After launching a successful consulting group dedicated to making web 2.0 “useful”, he moved to Europe to work more closely with entrepreneurs focused on the internet industry. With over 17 years of professional experience as a developer, manager and executive for software projects, Ashley is an inspiring leader who guarantees innovation, quality and performance.

Ashley is currently serving as advisor to multiple early stage startups.

What it's all about is how we react to the changing circumstances around us and how we manage to make big things and ideas come from the connections. This is my personal space to talk about the endless river of time and shifting circumstances. Life isn’t so much like a river as it is a rolling stone, edges being ground down, sometimes landing in a pile of fertilizer and other times in meadow of lilac and thyme.

Excerpted from http://ashley.raiteri.net ...More directly, I was born the youngest of Middle Class parents, and raised in a textiles-mill town whose best days were behind it. My father was an engineer and then a Salesman, with workaholic tendencies and a dedication to his craft he eventually became an successful Executive, retired early, ran a start-up and retired again. My mother was an artist before she became my mother, and remained a veritable dilettante (I mean that favorably) as a woman,  but more like Athena as a mother. She ran a crafts store, painted, played piano and instructed me or had me instructed in all the arts and skills I was supposed to have to be well rounded and educated.

...I was intellectually lazy and barely escaped from Georgia Tech with a Degree in Physics, but soon took as serious interest in software development after I began working as a Missile Scientist in the Arizona desert. I met a woman, fell in love, and we began to raise a family, but within a few years I turned rogue and began hiring myself out to whichever defense and space company was in the deepest trouble and therefore paid the highest rates. We moved through Madison Wisconsin, Rockford Illinois, Louisville Kentucky and San Diego

My wife and I eventually landed in Seattle where we re-built a craftsman bungalow and raised our second child. Much of the work was done with our own two hands (She was a professional designer and musician at the time ) and after a while working for someone else began to get under my skin. We started a defense systems consulting company, started a medical start-up within that and I got my first tastes of Start-up fever.

So we put the house on the market, got out just before the big crash, moved to Europe and let the start-up fever wash over us. We have lived in Copenhagen, Denmark; Sofia, Bulgaria; and Mallorca, Spain.

For more details on my professional life see my CV page.