Wes Boyd (born c.1960) is an American software developer and political organizer. In 1987, he and his wife

Joan Blades Joan Ellen Blades (born March 18, 1956 in Berkeley, California) is an American computer software entrepreneur, political activist, and author. In 1987, she and her husband Wes Boyd co-founded Berkeley Systems, a San Francisco Bay area software co ...

co-founded

Berkeley Systems Berkeley Systems was a San Francisco Bay Area software company co-founded in 1987 by Wes Boyd and Joan Blades. It made money early on by performing contract work for the National Institutes of Health, specifically in making modifications to the ...

, a

San Francisco Bay area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

software company.Bozman, Jean S. (1990)
Macs talk to visually impaired
, ''

Computerworld ''Computerworld'' (abbreviated as CW) is an ongoing decades old professional publication which in 2014 "went digital." Its audience is information technology (IT) and business technology professionals, and is available via a publication website ...

'', June 4, 1990. Retrieved November 16, 2013 After selling the company in 1997, Boyd and Blades went on to found the

liberal Liberal or liberalism may refer to: Politics * a supporter of liberalism ** Liberalism by country * an adherent of a Liberal Party * Liberalism (international relations) * Sexually liberal feminism * Social liberalism Arts, entertainment and m ...

political group

MoveOn.org MoveOn (formerly known as MoveOn.org) is a progressive public policy advocacy group and political action committee. Formed in 1998 around one of the first massively viral email petitions, MoveOn has since grown into one of the largest grassroot ...

in 1998.Crumlish, Christian ''The Power of Many: How the Living Web Is Transforming Politics, Business, And Everyday Life'', Sybex, , p. 30

Early life and education

He was born in 1960. Native to

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...

, he was active with computers at age 14, then later dropped out of college to pursue his interest in software design.

Career

Berkeley Systems

He was a programmer at the

University of California Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...

for several years. Afterwards, he created software for PC users who were visually impaired. In 1987 he founded

with

, with Boyd serving as technical expert and CEO. In 1990, he was Berkeley Systems president, and had been working with Marc Sutton on software to aid sight-impaired computer users. It was also selling mass-market Mac utilities. In the early 1990s, Boyd's popular screen saver bundle had brought in several millions of dollars. By the end of the 1990s, he left that business, and became politically active. By the late 1990s, the company employed 150 people and made around $30 million a year in sales. He sold the company to

CUC International CUC (Comp-U-Card) International Inc. was a membership-based consumer services conglomerate with travel, shopping, auto, dining, home improvement and financial services offered to more than 60 million customers worldwide based in Stamford, Connectic ...

for $25 million in 1997.

MoveOn.org

He and his wife Joan Blades in 1998 founded MoveOn.org online. A one-sentence petition to move on from the Clinton scandal was first sent to several-hundred friends and family, and "very shortly" they had half a million people involved. The email involved a simple online submission form. The site moveon.org appeared September 18, 1998 with the sole purpose of building a petition to express disapproval of Bill Clinton, call for a "quick censure" and move on to other issues. Boyd and Blades styled it as a "flash campaign." When the signatures were collected, Boyd and Blades printed out 20,000 pages of email and had them hand-delivered to every member of the House of Congress. By 1999, the organization had raised $12 million in pledges to congressional campaigns of people who had not voted in favor of impeachment. It did so through the PAC MoveOn Political Action Committee. In 2000, the organization petitioned Ralph Nader to drop out of the 2000 presidential race so he wouldn't draw votes from

Al Gore Albert Arnold Gore Jr. (born March 31, 1948) is an American politician, businessman, and environmentalist who served as the 45th vice president of the United States from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Gore was the Democratic Part ...

. In 2002, they supported

Paul Wellstone Paul David Wellstone (July 21, 1944 – October 25, 2002) was an American academic, author, and politician who represented Minnesota in the United States Senate from 1991 until he was killed in a plane crash near Eveleth, Minnesota, in 2002. A me ...

. In 2004, Boyd and Blades were named NPT Executives of the Year by the ''Nonprofit Times''. By 2008, it had an email list of 4.2 million names and had donated $118 into political matters, such as "opposing U.S. involvement in the Iraq war, supporting an unregulated Internet and helping hurricane victims find temporary housing, among other activities. The group runs ads on television, on the Internet and in newspapers and magazines."

Personal life

Boyd is married to

, also his long-term business partner. They have two children and live in Berkeley.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Boyd, Wes Living people Year of birth missing (living people)