Jon Hirschtick

Jon Hirschtick
Born Chicago, U.S.
Education Bachelors and Masters from MIT
Years active 1980–present
Title Chairman of the Board at Onshape
Spouse(s) Randy Lyanne Gollub (m. 2011)

Jon Hirschtick is a leading innovator in CAD software development, responsible for two of the field's greatest breakthroughs: SolidWorks, the first solid modeling 3D CAD and CAE system created for Microsoft Windows, and Onshape, the first CAD program developed fully for cloud implementation. Hirschtick is one of a handful of CAD executives to be awarded the prestigious CAD Society Leadership Award;[1] other recipients of this award include PLM decision-makers and CEOs such as Autodesk’s Carl Bass, Dassault Systèmes’ Bernard Charles, and 3D Systems's Ping Fu. Hirschtick is also a recipient of the ASME Leadership Award.[2]

In the mid-1990s, Hirschtick made a big bet that engineers were ready to use PCs and a relatively-new operating system called Windows as part of their job.[3] He was a founder and former CEO of Solidworks,[4][5][6] which became one of the most dominant desktop CAD systems, displacing long-entrenched rivals.[7][8] Solidworks was acquired by Dassault Systèmes, and Hirschtick continued on as a group executive there.[9][10] In 2012, Hirschtick and other members of the original SolidWorks team founded Belmont Technology (later changed to Onshape),[11][12] to create a CAD system that was fully implemented via the cloud. Other CAD software providers had developed implementations that used the cloud for file storage and sharing. Their Onshape is the first and only full-cloud 3D CAD system, which implemented compute-intensive rendering tasks on cloud servers rather than local desktop clients.[13] Hirschtick is a founder and chairman of the Board at Onshape.[14]

Early in his career Hirschtick was director of engineering at Computervision (1981-1983),[15] he was a manager at the MIT CADLab, and he was a player and instructor on the MIT Blackjack Team,[16] which was featured in the movies 21 and Breaking Vegas.[17][18] He is a member of Advisory Board at Arcbazar and served as its Director,[9] serves on the Engineering Advisory Board at Boston University, and as an advisor to Magic Leap, Inc. and MarkForged, Inc.[19]

Career

Hirschtick holds a Bachelors and Masters from MIT at 1983 and 1986,[5] and has worked in CAD for over 30 years.

He took about $1 million while a member of the MIT Blackjack Team and used this money to create a team to build 3D CAD software.[20][21]

Hirschtick founded SolidWorks in 1993, his goal was to build easy-to-use 3D CAD software for Windows.[4] In 1997, SolidWorks sold to Dassault Systemes for $318 million, and Hirschtick stayed on board for the next 14 years.[22] Under his leadership, SolidWorks grew to a $100 million revenue company.[14] In October 2012 Hirschtick left SolidWorks to found Belmont Technology, the company that developed Onshape CAD.[23][24]

References

  1. ↑ "CAD Society Announces Its 2015 Award Winners and One Surprise Winner To Be Announced At COFES". Cyon Research. April 6, 2015.
  2. ↑ "Leadership Award". The American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
  3. ↑ Kirsner, Scott (March 6, 2016). "Can 50-somethings rekindle that old startup magic?". Boston Globe.
  4. 1 2 Michael Skok (May 9, 2014). "Founders Can't Scale: Fact or Fiction?". Forbes.
  5. 1 2 "Sharing the excitement of mechanical engineering research". MIT News. September 23, 2016.
  6. ↑ Emily Maltby (July 29, 2010). "Affordable 3-D Arrives". Wall Street Journal.
  7. ↑ "Solid finds solution in business park switch". The Sheffield Telegraph. December 10, 2009. Retrieved 2010-02-15.
  8. ↑ Frausto-Robledo, Anthony (April 1, 2015). "3D Hubs report shows most popular 3D Modeling software is SolidWorks". Architosh.
  9. 1 2 "Jon Hirschtick M.S.". Bloomberg.
  10. ↑ Mings, Josh (October 5, 2011). "Jon Hirschtick Resigns from DS SolidWorks". SolidSmack.
  11. ↑ Ruth Simon, AngusS Loten (August 14, 2013). "Litigation Over Noncompete Clauses Is Rising". Wall Street Journal.
  12. ↑ "Belmont Technology is now Onshape, Inc.". CIMData. January 9, 2014.
  13. ↑ "Onshape is the First Professional 3D CAD System for iPad Pro & Apple Pencil". Manufacturingtomorrow. March 18, 2016.
  14. 1 2 Erin Griffith (March 6, 2015). "Exclusive: SolidWorks vets raise $64 million for Onshape". Fortune.
  15. ↑ William D. Bygrave, Dan D'Heilly. "The Portable MBA in Entrepreneurship Case Studies".
  16. ↑ Tim Fryer (13 May 2016). "Ahead in the cloud". Eureka Magazine.
  17. ↑ "21 (2008)". IMDb.
  18. ↑ "Breaking Vegas (2004)". IMDb.
  19. ↑ Kirsner, Scott (March 9, 2015). "Onshape chairman Jon Hirschtick on CAD, 3D printing, and more". BetaBoston.
  20. ↑ "Hawk Ridge Systems and ATR Soft Create xBOM Tool for SOLIDWORKS".
  21. ↑ Robert Buderi (March 27, 2008). "Of Card-Counting, Startups, and the Real Story of the MIT Blackjack Team". Xconomy.
  22. ↑ Newton, Randall (October 4, 2011). "Jon Hirschtick leaves Dassault Systemes SolidWorks". GraphicSpeak.
  23. ↑ Connie Loizos (September 24, 2015). "Onshape Raises $80 Million Led By Andreessen Horowitz". TechCrunch.
  24. ↑ "Jon Hirschtick - Onshape is the New Generation of CAD". The Engineer. December 15, 2015.
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