Dougherty ’74 Reflects on Career on Ground Floor of Gaming, PCs, Smartphones, and Interactive TV

 

I grew up in the Northeast, in St. Jerome’s Parish, the middle of seven children (five girls and two boys); a typical Northeast Irish Catholic family in those days. My father (John J. Dougherty ’42) and brother (John J. Dougherty ’68) both went to the Prep. My brother was 6 years older and was a great older brother. When I was in grade school and John was at the Prep, he would take me along with his buddies (who amazingly never complained about a little squirt tagging along) to Prep football games. I could sing the Prep fight song when I was in third grade, and throughout grade school, it was my goal to go to the Prep. I did well on the entrance exam and was awarded a partial scholarship, but was heartbroken when my dad told me it was not going to be enough. The family was already stretched paying for my older brother’s tuition at Villanova. Seeing how crushed I was, my dad did something that I’m sure was hard for him. He went down to the Prep and met with Mr. (Dan) Brennan, the director of admission, and explained the situation. My dad said that in two years, after my brother graduated, he would be able to pay the full tuition but until then, the family couldn’t afford to send me there. Dad asked if they could apply all four years of my scholarship to the first two years. The Prep agreed and my dad came home and let me know I would be in the Prep Class of ’74. It is hard to describe my elation; the incredible emotional swing. I remember breaking down and crying with joy. I still get choked up thinking about it today. It’s also hard to convey the depths of my gratitude to the Prep. 

 

At the Prep I was in the AP Chemistry, Physics, and Math track and all my teachers were great. Fr. (Stephen) Garber, S.J., particularly stands out as a truly inspiring teacher. I was on the swim team, track team, and cross country team, and enjoyed playing intramural football, basketball, and floor hockey. More importantly, I made best friends for life. Even though I moved out of the area, whenever I’m back in Philly I always make it a point to see Joe Boyle and Don McGettigan, my closest classmates, and whenever possible, other buddies from our class. Whenever we get together, it’s like we are transported back in time to the Prep cafeteria arguing sports or solving the world’s problems (at least in our own minds!) and the years dissolve away. I was recently back at the Prep for my 50th reunion and got to see and chat with many more of my Prep brothers, some I hadn’t seen since our 10-year reunion or graduation. It was awesome.

 

After I graduated from the Prep, I once again followed in my brother’s and father’s footsteps and enrolled at Villanova, studying electrical engineering just as they had. My father worked in electric power research for Philadelphia Electric. My dad’s career progressed while I was at the Prep and my first year at Villanova, culminating in an offer to head one of the four divisions of the national Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, CA. The family moved west and I transferred to UC Berkeley.

 

I believe a big part of success in life is fueled by confidence and I was never intimidated throughout my college studies because I knew I had a great educational foundation from the Prep. I graduated with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Berkeley in 1979. This year turned out to be a good time to be entering Silicon Valley with an EECS degree. I worked in the birth of the video game industry at both Atari and Mattel, the birth of the PC industry, online services (helping America Online get launched) and the internet, smartphones, and interactive television. I was a founder of a video game company called Imagic that had a meteoric rise (and then fall in the first wave of that industry) and was later sold to Activision. I founded a PC software company (GeoWorks) that later pivoted to work on smartphones with Nokia, paving the way for the iPhone. GeoWorks went public in 1993, and I cashed in some of my stock, hired a professional CEO, and left to start my next company, Wink Communications. Wink pioneered interactive television and did software for cable companies like TCI, Time Warner, Spectrum, and Comcast, as well as DirecTV and several TV manufacturers. Wink went public in 1999 and then was acquired in 2002 by Liberty Media. 

 

At the ripe old age of 46, I tried my hand at retirement. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to be retired, so in less than a year I got bored and started an internet company called AirSet, which developed a cloud-based group coordination service similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams long before those products existed. Unfortunately we were a little ahead of the adoption curve for cloud services and AirSet didn’t get enough paying customers to sustain itself. I shut the company down and retired again in 2013. By this time I had figured out how to be retired. 

 

On a personal level, I married in 1989 and am still with my wife Anna. We have two sons, Connor and Aidan, and one of my great regrets was that living on the West Coast, I could not send them to the Prep. My brother John was not only able to send his son to the Prep, but my nephew John Dougherty ’04 works there as Director of Mission and Ministry. Despite not being Preppers, my sons have managed. My older son Connor is a golf course architect living in Portland, and my younger son Aidan just graduated from USC with a master’s degree in computer science and is living in LA. Anna and I have homes in the San Francisco Bay Area, Hawaii (Maui), and Lake Tahoe and thoroughly enjoy spending time in all three places. 

 

I should point out that my older brother John, was also a very successful engineer. Working at General Electric, he rose to become Chief Engineer of the GE Systems Division, has 55 patents to his name, and oversaw numerous successful projects for GE. My dad, my brother, and myself: three Prep grads who all went on to successful engineering careers. While my Dad has passed on, I know he would agree with me and my brother that we owe our success in no small measure to the head start on life we got at the Prep. Not just because of the great academic foundation, but because the Prep taught us how to interact and care for the people around us, how to work as a team, and how to tackle tough problems. The Prep leaves an indelible mark on all who attend and we were blessed to have that privilege.