Gary Durbin is a serial entrepreneur and software industry pioneer. Instead of writing computer code and starting software companies, he now writes, hikes, and advises young entrepreneurs.

He has authored four software patents—one for artificial intelligence engine for massively parallel computers—and wrote about measuring operating systems for the National Bureau of Standards.

Mr. Durbin started his career as a technologist specializing in operating systems and databases. His first company, Institute for Cybernetic Development, Inc., developed operating system improvements for IBM computers. That company introduced Secure, the first commercial software security product. It was marketed by Boole and Babbage (now BMC Software). Mr. Durbin then founded Tesseract Corporation. Tesseract became one of the leading Human Resource software companies providing significant innovations to the industry such as the Time Relational Database and Real-time HR Transaction Processing. Mr. Durbin left Tesseract in 1995 following its sale to Ceridian.

Gary led a research project into the use of artificial intelligence for business systems. That project led to one of the earliest AI patents and an experimental project in computer-aided tutoring.

In 1996, Mr. Durbin founded Seeker Software and was its first CEO. Seeker grew rapidly after introducing the first employee desktop, a Web application, in late 1996. Two-and-a-half years later, Seeker was acquired by Concur Technologies.

Mr. Durbin holds four software patents, one for distributed inference on massively parallel computers. He has published several technical articles in magazines and journals and authored a special publication of the National Bureau of Standards. He has published short stories and his first novel, Nano-Uncertainty.

“James works to untangle Alison’s code to understand the artificial intelligence buried inside Varabot. He employs his own Visualizer program to do so, with terrifying results. Durbin takes the reader deep inside a tech startup in this novel, covering both its engineering and financial aspects. He does an admirable job of depicting the industry’s gamesmanship, and this gives the book a feeling of complex authenticity.”
– Kirkus Reviews