Jeremy D. Allaire (born 13 May 1971) is an American-born technologist and Internet entrepreneur. He is currently CEO and founder of the digital currency company Circle and Chairman of the Board of Brightcove. Along with his brother JJ Allaire, he co-founded Allaire Corporation in 1995. Allaire Corp. experienced a successful IPO in January 1999 and was eventually acquired by rival Macromedia in 2001. Allaire served as CTO of Macromedia following the acquisition and helped develop the Macromedia MX platform (a suite of software tools and servers aimed at enabling rich applications delivered using Flash Player).
Allaire left Macromedia in February 2003 to sign up for venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners as being a technologist and executive-in-residence. In 2004, Allaire founded Brightcove, an online video platform used by lots of top media and marketing organizations worldwide. Following a successful IPO during early 2012, Allaire stepped down as Brightcove CEO in 2013 and currently may serve as Chairman in the Board.
In October 2013, Allaire announced the launch of Circle, an online-based consumer finance company that aims to bring the energy and advantages of digital money, including Bitcoin, to mainstream consumers.
Allaire was educated inside the Montessori tradition, which he says, “built into us a belief in self-direction, in independent thought, in peer collaboration, in responsibility.”
In 1993 Allaire graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he received a double-major degree in political science and philosophy, having a concentration in economics. While at Macalester, his college roommate and-school friend, who worked for the campus IT group, rigged a high-speed Internet access to their dorm room, which allowed Jeremy Allaire CEO to gain access to and test out the net in its beginning.
From 1990 until his graduation, Allaire became obsessive about the web and exactly how it can be put on transform existing systems of communications and media, as well as the impact on fundamental human rights, including free speech. Jeremy was an early follower of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and later on recruited EFF founder Mitch Kapor for the board of directors of Allaire Corporation.
In 1992, Allaire authored an insurance policy proposal for the roll-out of a National Information Network, based on the National Research & Education Network (NREN, the precursor towards the commercial Internet), proposing methods to commercialize usage of IP services. This paper was sent to the Senate Subcommittee on Science and Technology, whose chair was Senator Al Gore.
In 1992 and 1993, with a college friend, Allaire developed a software called “World News Report” which aggregated news feeds and mailing list content from independent media sources available on the Internet, and provided a complete-text indexed browsable and searchable interface to get into independent journalism on the Internet (built using Apple Hypercard).
Also while in college, Allaire created NativeNet, which developed a decentralized communications and collaboration platform for Native American tribal schools in the Midwest, built on top of UUCP, an earlier internet protocol for distributed communications.
While at Macalester, Allaire became more politically active, choosing a particular interest in U.S. foreign policy and global human rights issues, such as the impact of the collapse from the Soviet Union, an upswing of authoritarian capitalist regimes in the east, as well as the Balkan Wars.
Upon his graduation from Macalester, Allaire found the Internet was “the central passion” in the life. Inside the fall of 1993, he launched an online-consulting firm, Global Internet Horizons, geared towards helping media publishers and marketers understand and make a presence on the nascent World Wide Web.
During 1994-1996, Allaire collaborated with prominent American linguist and political activist, Noam Chomsky, along with his wife Carol to develop the first comprehensive online archive of his political works. Chomsky’s libertarian socialist and globalist views resonated with Allaire.
Allaire Corporation
At the begining of 1994, Allaire became convinced that the architecture in the Web could disrupt how software was built and distributed, transforming the browser from as being a document browsing system in to a full online operating system for just about any kind of software program.
In 1995, Jeremy and his awesome brother J.J. Allaire, along with a selection of close college friends, founded their very own web company, Allaire Corporation, using $18,000 of J.J.’s savings. Allaire Corporation aimed to offer easy-to-use web design tools.
The brothers invented ColdFusion, a rapid web application development platform created to easily connect simple HTML pages to your database using its associated scripting language, ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). ColdFusion was popular, and corporations including Myspace, Target, and Toys R Us (in addition to millions of other websites) relied on the technology from Allaire to build up their online properties.
Allaire Corp. grew rapidly, from just over $1M in revenue in 1996, to $120M in revenue around 2000, growing to in excess of 700 employees and operating with offices throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. As well as its flagship product ColdFusion, Allaire launched HomeSite, which became the most famous Windows HTML Editor on earth, and JRun, one of many galqfw and most widely adopted Java app servers.
Allaire also helped to pioneer foundational ideas in open distributed computing based upon light-weight HTTP-based distributed objects. Specifically, the company developed the internet Distributed Data Exchange (WDDX) in 1998, an open source format for utilizing HTTP for simple remote procedure calls, a precursor for the adoption of REST and JSON for web software APIs.
Allaire Corp. had its IPO in January 1999 and was acquired by Macromedia in March 2001 for people$360M in a deal that included cash and stock. Due to this acquisition, Jeremy Allaire became CTO of Macromedia.