Larry Augustin (born October 10, 1962) is a VP at Amazon Web Services. He formerly was the chairman of the board of directors of

SugarCRM SugarCRM is a software company based in Silicon Valley. It produces the on-premises and cloud-based web application Sugar, a customer relationship management (CRM) system. SugarCRM's functionality includes sales-force automation, marketing cam ...

. He is a former

venture capitalist Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

and the founder of VA Software (now

Geeknet Geeknet, Inc. is a Fairfax County, Virginia–based company that is a subsidiary of GameStop. The company was formerly known as VA Research, VA Linux Systems, VA Software, and SourceForge, Inc. History VA Research VA Research was founded in Nove ...

). During the height of the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

, Augustin was a billionaire on paper at the age of 38. Augustin is featured in the 2001 documentary film '' Revolution OS''.

Early life and education

Augustin grew up in a suburb of Dayton,

Ohio Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...

, though he spent some of his early life on a family farm in

New Hampshire New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec to the nor ...

. After receiving a B.S. in electrical engineering from the

University of Notre Dame The University of Notre Dame du Lac, known simply as Notre Dame ( ) or ND, is a private Catholic university, Catholic research university in Notre Dame, Indiana, outside the city of South Bend, Indiana, South Bend. French priest Edward Sorin fo ...

, Augustin received a fellowship from

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...

to pursue a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. He went to work for Bell Labs for a year and then returned to Stanford to pursue a PhD.

Career

In 1993, Augustin founded VA Research (later VA Linux and

), while a Ph.D. student at Stanford. Augustin was a Stanford colleague of Jerry Yang and David Filo, the founders of

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...

. Filo and Yang introduced Augustin to Sequoia Capital, which provided Augustin with

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

. In November 1999, he launched

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirroring ...

, a

collaborative development environment A collaborative development environment (CDE) is an online meeting space where a software development project's stakeholders can work together, no matter what time zone or region they are in, to discuss, document, and produce project deliverables. ...

or " forge". On December 9, 1999, during the

, VA Linux became a

public company A public company is a company whose ownership is organized via shares of stock which are intended to be freely traded on a stock exchange or in over-the-counter markets. A public (publicly traded) company can be listed on a stock exchange ( ...

via an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investme ...

and Augustin, then 38-years old, became a billionaire on paper. In August 2002, Augustin left VA Linux and from September 2002 to December 2004, he was a partner at

Azure Capital Partners Azure Capital Partners, which was established in 2000, is an early stage venture capital firm that invests in the information technology industry using an investment research approach to venture capital investing. Azure Capital Partners was fou ...

, where he helped lead Azure's investments in Zend Technologies and Medsphere. In 2005, Augustin joined the board of directors of SugarCRM and in May 2009, Augustin was appointed as the

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especial ...

. Augustin was the CEO of SugarCRM until February 2019 when Craig Charlton was appointed the role, with. Augustin remaining the chairman of the board of directors. As of July 2019, he became a VP at Amazon Web Services.

Personal life

Augustin works out in a gym every day after work. He is married and has a daughter born in 1997.

References

External links

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Interviews

Audio interview
on

FLOSS Weekly FLOSS Weekly is a free and open-source software ( FLOSS) themed netcast from the TWiT Network. The show premiered on April 7, 2006, and features interviews with prominent guests from the free software/open source community. It was originally hoste ...

Interview
on

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Interview
on Linux Journal {{DEFAULTSORT:Augustin, Larry American venture capitalists Living people Geeknet Stanford University School of Engineering alumni 1962 births American company founders American technology chief executives Open source advocates Notre Dame College of Engineering alumni People from New Hampshire