Eric Hughes

When a powerful new technology comes around, there are always people who seem to have been waiting for it, almost expecting it. That is certainly true of the web and Eric Hughes, Simplexity’s Managing Director. Eric’s life seems to have progressed so that when the web took off, he would be in the right place at the right time with the right skills to put it to good use.

Growing up in Indiana, where basketball is something of a secular religion, Eric was one of those fellows who (in between dribbles) found time to tinker around with photography and television cameras. After college he worked in the health care field, developing ways to communicate arcane and sometimes scary things to hospital patients. He designed and implemented one of the first hospital closed-circuit television stations dedicated to patient education during that stint. In graduate school, he was also an early user and admirer of a prototype University of Illinois computer-based medical education system.

Eric then worked as a professional photographer, photographing medical procedures, public relations events, and even an occasional wedding. This he describes as, “the hardest and most stressful work I’ve ever done, because there were never any second chances. If a shot was missed, it was missed for eternity.”

Then one day, after Eric had moved to California, he touched his first Apple II, and his life was changed forever. He was fascinated by what he saw as an opportunity to use computers to deliver customized, on-demand training. When a friend described what a difficult problem it was to move information to and from computers, Eric was hooked.

Within a couple of years he earned a masters degree in Telecommunications, and took a job designing business data networks and technical training programs for Lockheed in the Silicon Valley. From there, he moved into financial services as a Director at Charles Schwab, where he worked on the data and voice network design of Schwab’s electronic distribution and delivery applications and trading environments. Eric managed the design, purchase, installation, and support of multi-million dollar, mission-critical, systems.

Eric was then recruited by Wells Fargo Bank, where he initiated and ran a cross-disciplinary group responsible for architecting and implementing one of the largest private TCP/IP-based networks in the U.S. After a stint as the Manager of Technical Communications, Eric was promoted to Vice President of Intranet Applications. In that role, he built a group to design, implement, and manage the new bank ‘internal internet.’ By the time Eric left Wells in late 1997 to go into business for himself, he had established a solid reputation in that world, and the bank’s Homestead intranet had grown to serve more than 20,000 employees.

After proving the power of web technology, it was natural for Eric to start Simplexity in early 1998. "I was convinced," he says, "that the Internet and the web would fundamentally change every business process and rule that existed, and I knew I wanted to be a part of that experience."

Despite occasional long hours, Eric does maintain a private life. (Keeping up a vigorous texting dialogue with your spouse is another good use of advanced technology.) Eric and his wife have two sons who are bilingual in French and English, and play soccer and baseball. Eric's elder son attends college near Philadelphia, and his younger son is in high school in San Francisco. Eric also plays guitar in a country rock band that released its first CD in early 2006, and guitar in a bluegrass band called Foggy Gulch that released its first CD in January of 2008.

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