Mike Hayward's Biography

In 1981, Mike Hayward wrote his first computer program on an Apple II computer.  By the time he'd graduated high school in 1989 he'd gotten perfect marks in all of his courses, among them several college senior level courses including VAX Assembly Language, C, Operating Systems and Physics I - III with Calculus.  By this time Mike had also held various software jobs and tutored programming in C and BASIC.

Mr. Hayward spent the first two years of his college career at the Colorado School of Mines.  While there he learned the ins and outs of System V and Berkeley Unix; began programming in C++, Lisp, and Pascal; and mastered multi-threaded socket programming for TCP/IP.  At CSM, Mr. Hayward also worked on many independent computer science projects.  Shortly before leaving CSM, he had the unique opportunity to work with George Almasi of the IBM T. J. Watson research facility to develop a highly parallel geophysics imaging application that ran on dozens of IBM's RS6000 workstations.

Over the next three years, Mr. Hayward studied Mathematics, Computer Science, and Computer Architecture intensively at Carnegie Mellon University.  At CMU he learned dozens of computer languages, implemented a very powerful operating system, wrote several compilers and designed a microprocessor from gate level logic on up. Mr. Hayward also pursued graduate level courses and had a great rapport with his professors which helped him obtain an internship at Intel Corporation.  Mr. Hayward graduated with honors in 1994 with a bachelor's degree in Math and Computer Science.

During his eighteen months at Intel, Mr. Hayward worked for SSD (Supercomputer Systems Division) and SCIC (Supercomputer Interconnect Components).  There he designed and implemented real time fractal graphics software to demonstrate the power of the iWarp supercomputer. Then he went on to design and implement a parallel circuit simulation application (DVT) that allowed conventional single processor simulations to be tested against one another or to be distributed over many machines or even a massively parallel Paragon supercomputer.  This software technology has been used by Intel to design and test circuits since 1993 (including various supercomputer communications chips and the Merced processor), and has significantly reduced development time and cost.

After graduating from CMU, Mr. Hayward moved to Seattle where he worked for ConnectSoft, a Microsoft satellite company.  While at ConnectSoft he wrote code for MS Windows, implemented one of the first MIME mail transport agents, and designed the networking portion of a remote patient monitoring software suite for SpaceLabs.

During the summer of 1994, Mr. Hayward began working with three other colleagues to start up a multinational financial information company called Internet Securities, Inc.  Later that year he moved to Pittsburgh to work full time for the fledgling business, and after about a month Mr. Hayward relocated again to Warsaw, Poland where he pioneered the first remote data sourcing office for ISI throughout most of 1995.

Although practically unheard of in the business world, ISI took an inexpensive, open systems approach to it's technology.  PC's, the Perl programming language, the Linux operating system, the Internet, and the World Wide Web were the foundation of what would grow over the next few years to be the leading provider of emerging market business and professional information.  Since ISI was dependent on the Internet, which barely existed in Poland when Mr. Hayward first arrived, he also started the second public Internet access provider (Internet Technologies) there.

Mr. Hayward acquired and set up all the original hardware, software, and telecommunications for the businesses and developed a system for reliably moving data back to ISI's headquarters in Pittsburgh.  He was responsible for recruiting, training and managing the dozen or so employees for the two companies and managed all the budgets and accounting as well.  Mr. Hayward negotiated data provision contracts and once the service became salable, went on numerous sales calls as well.

After a successful round of financing, ISI decided to expand heavily throughout Eastern Europe and Russia.  Mr. Hayward spent the majority of 1996 leveraging his experience in Poland to help set up offices in Prague, Moscow, Budapest, Istanbul, and Sofia.  During this time he focused primarily on choosing office locations, selecting viable telecommunications, setting up hardware and software, and interviewing and training local systems administrators and programmers.

In 1997, Mr. Hayward moved to New Hampshire and helped relocate ISI's headquarters from Pittsburgh to downtown Boston and then focused on upgrading to new technology, world wide security administration, and customizing back office systems for sales support, customer support and accounting.  Mr. Hayward recruited and trained several additional developers from the Boston area as well.  By the end of 1997 ISI had grown to over 150 employees and 18 offices and was well on it's way to entrepreneurial success.

Early in 1998, Mr. Hayward left Internet Securities to found Loup Technologies, Inc. which is focused on providing quality consulting services to businesses in the United States.  Most of LT's clients reside in California, Colorado, and Massachusetts. In addition to consultimg, Mr. Hayward cofounded Compteon, Inc., an online training application focused on safety.  The product was fully developed, functional, and sold to customers and is now in a low maintenance operational mode.

In the summer of 2002, Mr. Hayward moved to Boulder, CO to be near his family and took a job with LeftHand Networks, Inc. to test and develop software and hardware on embedded linux systems.  He spent the majority of his efforts developing the world's most sophisticated NVRAM device.

In 2004 and 2005, Mr. Hayward began SCSI/iSCSI and embedded linux systems consulting for various clients including Lefthand Networks, Edgewater networks, and HEI.  He also earned all of his piston land airplane flight instructor ratings (CFI, MEI, CFII) and acquired a turbo charged twin engine aircraft to facilitate long distance business trips and suppliment businesss income by flight instructing.

In 2007, Mr. Hayward founded a self funded startup called Sanify. Sanify is a distributed, fault tolerant iSCSI storage area network.  In 2010 the product was fully functional and in production.  By 2013 he had designed an enterprise grade rack mount solution with ECC memory, IPMI management, and industrial flash.

From 2015 Mr. Hayward worked with Micron Technologies assisting with their entrance into the solid state storage device market by developing low level embedded device software.  He also helped set up and support multiple Git repositories as well as their Jenkins test denvironment.

From 2017 Mr. Hayward worked with Dektec, a company based in the Netherlands, to develop high performance video encoding, decoding, rendering, and transmission software and hardware products.  He worked on drivers, libraries, and user space applications for Windows and Linux and assisted with the design, debug, and test of PCIe hardware and firmware.

In his spare time, Mr. Hayward enjoys being with his friends and family in Colorado and helping out with the family ranch.  He's very athletic and likes to spend time outdoors, reads frequently, loves to cook, and enjoys aviation.