Laura McKinney
Contact
Chief Executive Officer
Office: 503.626.6616 x111
Email: laura (at) galois (dot) com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/laura-mckinney/3/b83/906
At Galois
I have the privilege of nurturing the collaboration that is Galois. Galois is an amazing group of talented, motivated, and interesting people. We work together inspired by the examples of AES Corp. as described in Joy at Work and of Ricardo Semler in Maverick. We work from the principles of authenticity, trust, stewardship, learning and innovation. Those principles are not trapped in posters on the walls, but rather woven into our very structure. We aim to make a significant difference for our clients, and I'm passionate about helping that to happen.
My Background
I grew up in the sunny and snowy climate of Colorado, and skied with leather ski boots on wooden skis. Back then there wasn't even a freeway to Vail. Professionally, I completed a Distributed Studies degree in Math/Computer Science way back in the early 80's from the University of Colorado. Over the next decade, I mixed childrearing and the pursuit of graduate studies in CS, culminating in an MS degree from the Oregon Graduate Institute. My mentors there - Dick Kieburtz and Jim Hook - helped to germinate a love of functional languages. For a few years, I enjoyed some commercial software development jobs. After seeing the young ones reach school age, I moved into adjunct teaching and then to a project management job at the Pacific Software Research Center at the Oregon Graduate Institute. There I learned about large teams collaborating to build significant, revolutionary and interesting software. One frustration was the lack of good technology transition from our research institute to the larger world. We built very useful tools, but they were locked in the labs. I moved from that position back into teaching full-time. I was lured away by John Launchbury into his new startup, Galois. He promised me that I wouldn't have to do any management, and could focus on technical work. He is very persuasive.