Ken Case — Founder, CEO

Ken Case is Chairman and CEO of the Omni Group, which he founded with Tim Wood and Wil Shipley. Ken is a computer geek at heart, and continues to contribute directly to all of Omni's products as an interface designer and software engineer, most recently working on OmniFocus. Before founding Omni in 1992, Ken worked as an application programmer for NeXT, a systems programmer for the University of Washington, and a systems administrator for both the Center for Process Analytical Chemistry and Statistical Sciences, Inc.

During his early career he developed software for over eighteen operating systems, but since finding the NeXT / Mac / iPhone platform he's been happy to focus on the platform which he feels makes our team the most productive. He's contributed free source code to the net throughout his career, and has used both emacs and vi daily for over twenty-five years (avoiding flame wars with either camp). Ken lives in Seattle with his wife of seventeen years, his two daughters (ages nine and seven), and two cats (the spawn of Omni's office cat).

Tim Wood — Founder, Vice President of Software Development

Tim graduated from the University of Washington with two bachelor's degrees, Computer Science and Pure Mathematics. After a long stint consulting for Fortune 500 companies, followed by a shorter one doing game ports, Tim is joyously immersed in growing Mac OS X consumer software. Tim is the team lead for OmniFocus and OmniOutliner as well as working on the Omni Frameworks and serving as the Vice President of Software Development.

Tim lives in Seattle with his wife, son, and daughter.

Molly Reed — Vice President of Operations

Molly has a keen eye for detail and desire to optimize, which is good because she handles our finances, marketing, operations and user experience; she deals in what we call The Real World.

For example she tries to prevent us from burning down the building during an attempt to combine the sports of Polo and Peep Jousting. If someone tries to break into the building at 3AM, she gets a call. Molly also makes sure we have insurance, in case we do attempt such an awesome a terrible idea as Peep Polo and hurt ourselves in the process.

She is happiest when she is buried deep in the function catalogue of a spreadsheet. Molly recently earned her MBA (and is happy to not be working on it any more!) and helps out on the board of The Right Brain, which provides digital arts programming to Seattle area youth.

Molly is a native Pacific Northwesterner that is actively offended by socks with sandals. Most here would say she has a shoe problem, though.

Marketing

• Grayson West — Art Manager

  

  Grayson hails from the south coast of Oregon. A competitive cyclist since the age of 14, Grayson dropped out of college after one year and pursued a career as a professional cyclist. That dream culminated in two years of amateur racing in Belgium, France and Holland. After falling short of his dream of a professional cycling glory, due to a broken femur while racing in France, Grayson went back to America to discover what he wanted to do with his life.

  After healing near the beaches of San Clemente California, Grayson decided to surf his days away along the Pacific Coast of North and Central America. But after soon discovering that playing the ocean did not pay the bills, he found himself back at college studying the arts. He attended Savannah College of Art and Design and Northern Arizona University, where he received his B.F.A. in visual communication.

  At Omni, Grayson does graphic design for marketing materials including retail packaging, promotional materials, website graphics, advertising, and more.

• Linda Sharps — Marketing Communications

  

  Linda mostly performs copywriting-related stunts, although she can also do a cartwheel if you give her lots of ibuprofen afterwards.

  When she's not in the office, Linda can typically be found prying her children away from the various dangerous objects they seem to be magnetically drawn towards. She greatly enjoys zombies and individually wrapped Starlight mints.

Operations

• Trish Abbate — Operations Coordinator

  

  Graduate student by night and Omni problem-fixer by day, Trish is a native New Yorker, avid cyclist, yoga-lover, world traveler, and founding member of the Green Lake Anti-defamation League. General consensus around the office is that Trish makes a great coworker, even better friend, and would be that nice neighbor who would water your plants while you're on vacation, and not kill them.

• Aaron Bendickson — System Administrator

  

  Aaron came to Omni by way of Tacoma Washington, Missoula Montana, Boston Massachusetts, and eventually Tacoma again. He and his family recently moved to Seattle in order to reduce his commute to a reasonable level. Like most sys-admin types he lacks any inclination towards graphic design and though he can effortlessly install, configure, backup and maintain any website you throw at him... don't expect him to be able to make it LOOK good. A significant portion of his free time is dedicated to the making of music, which occasionally carries the added bonus of being mildly profitable. However, he's learning that late night blues gigs don't mix well with his young children's sleeping habits. Sleep deprivation is a way of life... isn't it?

  Likes: The Simpsons (prerequisite for being a sys-admin), good coffee (black, none of those foofy drinks), Battlestar Galactica (duh), vi, Strongbad Emails, and Moose Drool.

  Dislikes: text messages, poorly adjusted flat-panel televisions with the picture all stretched out, World of Warcraft (sssh... don't tell anyone at Omni or they'll probably fire him), and commuting.

• Tami Needham — Operations Assistant

  Tami somehow entered the realms of Omni without ever having heard of Battlestar Galactica or playing World of Warcraft. Prior to her Omni days, Tami studied Psychology at Seattle Pacific University. Before coming to Omni, Tami spent her days doing stuff like working with troubled adolescent boys and becoming a certified bra fitter at Nordstrom's.

  She has a green Jeep Wrangler named Jewel that occasionally carries her long distances through the ridiculous winter we seem to be having. She organizes "boutique-style" yard sales, but refuses to define what "boutique-style" means, so we're going to assume it means cookies. 

  Like the three-headed dog Cerberus of greek mythology, Tami fiercely defends our gates, protecting us from scary folk like the UPS delivery man. She demonstrates her awesomeness by doing so with two fewer heads.

• Terry Stearns — Executive Chef

  From tater tots to roasted salmon with a carrot vinaigrette, Terry keeps the Omni engine running with his tasty treats.

• Jordan Johnson — Kitchen Assistant

  

  Born to a walrus somewhere outside of Singapore in 1356, Jordan Johnson would quickly become known as "Skrabblebrabzle" which in Malaysian loosely translates to, "He who rains friendly kidney pie on all of your children's toes." in honor of the great deeds of pie showering he performed.

  Jordan resurfaces in historical text at the age of 20 leading an army of misfit children as they terrorize they streets of Paris stealing kidneys and selling them to the highest bidder. Eventually he was captured and imprisoned in the Bastille where he stayed for 6 months before he dug a tunnel out with a baugette. 

  Texts again get spotty at this time of his life but one archaeologist believes he has found multiple tapestries showing Jordan doing things like: spreading rats around densely populated European cities, jousting with nothing more then a halibut for a lance and butter churn for a helmet, and finally Jordan entering a box which then vanishes leaving behind a note that reads "SEEITH YE IN THE FUTURE!"

• Dan Miura — Kitchen Assistant

  Dan is a mohawk wearing, guitar shredding, punk rocking, ginsu chopping, cookie baking, mirepoix making, rice krispie sculpting, basil chiffonading, wrap wrapping, Rainier drinking, drum wailing, lyric hollering, world traveling, kitchen assistant.

Software Development

• Andrew Abernathy

  

  Andrew is mostly responsible for our spiffy online store, but has also worked on OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle and contributes to various of our products as a member of the user experience team. In his past, Andrew wrote traffic control systems software for five years before escaping VMS, DOS, and Atlanta. His flight took him to Seattle where he worked on AT&T Cellular Services' NeXTstep-based cellular offerings software for a year and a half before landing at Omni.

  Andrew has been programming since the early eighties (which also explains his taste in music). He was first able to program on NeXTstep around 1990, and was delighted to magically find himself a Mac developer after Apple bought NeXT at the end of 1996. He worked on major consulting projects in Omni's past, including AirMail—a NeXTstep-based OpenMail client, Standard & Poor's Personal Wealth, and the YourSchoolShop.com and GreaterGood.com cause-based web sites, but gets to focus on Omni's own applications now that we have transitioned from consulting to consumer software.

  Coming as he does from the deep South, Andrew fails to appreciate the fine seafood on offer in Seattle, but wishes there were more good southern BBQ restaurants nearby, though the lack of sweet iced tea is probably good for him.

• Tom Bunch

  

  In 1995, Tom abdicated his position as a research consultant at the University of Washington, where his responsibilities included saving Pacific Northwest salmon stocks from near certain extinction. Publicly, he'll tell you that his reasons for leaving such a heroic and selfless job basically stem from disillusionment with senators Ted Stevens and Slade Gorton from Alaska and Washington, respectively, who corrupted Tom's science from "how can we help these species recover" to "what's the largest number of fish I can I kill and still maybe get away with it?". His decision had nothing to do with money or groupies. Honest.

  Since joining Omni at that time, Tom's major clients have included Standard & Poors, Adobe Systems, Inc., Food.com, and MacPlay, Inc. Tom was recently placed in charge of the sheep dip, and is at present diligently installing bugs in OmniPlan to keep Mr. Kwong busy. In his spare time, he can be found in the North Cascades, leaping from tree to tree.

• William Lewis

  Wim is afraid of both cameras and bios. ← That's pretty much all this web page has ever said about Wim, but recently we learned some interesting information about Wim's childhood that we thought we would share. Years ago, a youthful and enterprising Wim installed a theremin behind a wall in his family's home - then he wired it into their intercom system. Whenever an unsuspecting victim would walk by, the instrument would come to life, filling the house with eerie wails.

  Now you know something about Wim, and, if you're like some of us, you've learned what a theremin is. Hooray!

• Ryan Patrick

  

  Ryan was born and raised in Syracuse, NY which explains why he thinks that Seattle has fabulous weather year-round. In a previous life, he was a mechanical engineer and spent a few years designing airplane engines (so, yes, you should be afraid to fly). After realizing that he enjoyed algorithms and conditional loops over gears and coefficients of friction, Ryan went back to school and got his Masters in CS from George Washington University in 2003.

  When not programming, Ryan can be found outside on either a trail or a bike.

  He works so that he can support his soccer habit and is still expecting a call from the national team.

• Kyle Sluder

  

  Kyle comes to Omni from Loyola University Maryland, where he started as an Economics major and finished with a B.S. in Computer Science. He has been programming for most of his life, on projects ranging from web-delivered educational games to video game modifications. In his spare time, Kyle roams Seattle looking for free WiFi access points.

• Robin Stewart

  Robin started programming for Mac OS X during his first year at Williams College, when he discovered that there was no good software for making economics-style graphs. After doing research in artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and information retrieval, he decided all of that was boring compared to sketching graphs, and wrote his MIT masters thesis on what had become a five-year "side project."

  Robin could not be happier that he and his graph sketching pursuits have found a new home at Omni, where he is now the lead developer on OmniGraphSketcher. He can generally be found drawing on whiteboards, walking through the nearby hills, jogging home from work, preparing to become a yoga master, and watching helplessly as pop-culture references fly over his head.

• Greg Titus

  Greg Titus is currently development lead on OmniPlan, after spending much of his time before that on OmniGraffle 2, 3, and 4.

  Greg joined Omni Development in late 1993, just after the company was incorporated. He came to Omni after four years at Microsoft, where he concentrated on software development tools and internet applications, helping to develop automated system testing software for OS/2 and Windows 3.1, internet FTP and SMTP servers for Windows NT, and designing a debugger of distributed object-oriented programs for the cancelled Cairo operating system.

  In his Omni-past, Greg initially specialized in index and database optimization, doing web indexing work for both InfoSeek (now Go.com) and Excite, and implementation of a third-tier database caching architecture for AT&T Wireless Services. Greg has led analysis, design, and development for many of Omni's past custom consulting projects, including Personal Wealth, Greater Good, and Enterprise Co-op.

• Rachael Worthington

  Rachael's a knitter, a D&Der, a video game player, a sports fan, a wife, a sister, a friend, and that crazy lady down the way. Also, sometimes the walking undead. Not often, though.

Software Test Pilots

• Kristina Sontag — QA Manager

  

  Growing up in Northern California, Kristina's love for science and technology was forcibly nurtured by the educational nature of every toy and game her mother bought her. Kristina decided "when life gives you typing tutors and math blasters you should just code your own games", spending many childhood hours hunched over her keyboard learning the basics of BASIC.

  Taking a summer job testing software at LucasArts Games while in college, Kristina turned her love of technology into a career spanning three states and many different areas of the computer industry. At Omni she can be found crashing software and tricking Lotus the office cat into a pedicure.

• Troy Brandt

  Troy grew up near Seattle and has always known that this is the town for him. Keeping with the spirit of Seattle he fell in love with music and has devoted much of his studies to writing, performing and recording music. He has an "art" school degree in Audio Production where he learned the art of knob twiddling and that dynamic compression is way cooler than boring overused digital effects. Somehow, he wound up with us here at Omni where he currently spends his days trying to make our code blow up and serving as the Product Manager for both OmniWeb and OmniDazzle.

• Kam Dahlin

  

  Kam comes from a background of professional audio engineering and production. He spent eight of his nearly ten year career, recording, mixing, editing, and building studios on land and at sea for Vulcan Inc. During this time, Kam worked on the music software DrumCore and its little brother KitCore, did his best to maintain recording systems in differing time zones, and generally tried to find the cleanest way to wrangle sound waves into 1s and 0s. After Vulcan Kam started his own residential systems integration company, but quickly decided that food and shelter were important - he was fortunate enough to then find Omni. Today he can be found in a dark office critiquing and breaking others' hard work.

  During his off hours Kam does AV integration and design work and tries to manage two rowdy little boys.

  He is a member of the Audio Engineering Society and prefers music that hasn't been smashed and squeezed to bits.

• Liz Marley

  Harvey Mudd College tried to teach Liz Computer Science, but each program she touched turned to bugs and crashes. Turning this liability into an asset, she began software testing in that state run by an Austrian movie star. But when she had hummed "I miss the rains down in Africa" a few too many times, she realized she had to leave the desert. Now in Seattle, she has an exciting career using our software way, way before we're finished writing it.

• Derek Motonaga

  

  Derek is well-loved by all of us here at Omni, but seems to be particularly well-loved by Lotus, our office cat. In fact, he's so well-loved that we've dubbed him "Mister Tunapants". Seriously, the wake that cat leaves as she bounds through the office towards Derek's lap could snap your neck if you're not careful. Derek also likes robots a whole bunch and plays a lot of World of Warcraft. He spends his time here figuring out how to break our software and refusing to write his own bio.

• Joel Reuter

  Joel has lived in lots of places, all of which were West of the Mississippi. He thinks that Seattle is a great place to live, thanks to its beautiful landscape, delicious coffee, and nerdy inhabitants.  Music was his first love, and he continues to listen and learn over time.  Besides growing up with a Apple II, Joel was introduced to the Mac world in college, developing a Blackjack game in Objective-C and Cocoa.  Anything involving Torx screwdrivers and a soldering iron sounds like fun to him, even if he isn't really sure what he's doing with them.

Support Ninjas and Product Managers

• Brian Covey — Support Manager

  

  Brian is something of an anomaly amongst the members of The Omni Group, since he didn't enter college until well after he could legally operate a motor vehicle, thinks that Portland is still far cooler than Seattle, and believes that Babylon 5, not Star Wars, is the definitive science fiction work of the latter half of the twentieth century. (Firefly, of course, is the first great work of the twenty-first, though Battlestar Galactica was comin' on strong for a season or two.) These deadly secrets will undoubtedly destroy him should they ever be discovered, so guard them well, my friend.

  By virtue of being hired before the rest of them, he ended up leading our dojo of elite support ninjas.

• Jameson Brown

  

  Jameson is yet another transplant from NYC (though he grew up in the quaint tourist town of Saratoga Springs), where he misses good Italian food and a decent public transit system, but not the lingering smell of hot garbage in the summer. He originally went to school for audio engineering, and worked at an audio post-production house in Manhattan before getting into the support business. He currently enjoys making music with his trusty laptop and, like every bored child of the suburbs, has a soft spot for video games of the 80's and early 90's.

  When not discovering new ways to enjoy bacon, Jameson answers e-mail for OmniFocus and OmniFocus for the iPhone.

• Aaron Kwong

  

  Aaron is curiously free of any really identifiable quirks that are easy to make fun of on the Internet, so we've decided he's a Stepford Robot, or maybe that guy from Westworld. He comes to us most recently from an Apple retail store. He's really happy that he'll never have anyone throw an iPod at him ever again. He does have the unfortunate character flaw of being unable to write his own bio for websites, but we overlook that, since he spends his time answering OmniPlan email.

• David Messent

  

  Dave answers support email for OmniWeb and is the Product Manager for OmniGraphSketcher. Born and raised in Seattle, he enjoys a quiet life at home with his wife, dog, and growing ukulele collection. Prior to joining Omni, Dave made coffee and powerpoints about mobile phones (though not at the same time).

• Paul Palinkas

  

  Paul Palinkas is a ninja and a gentleman, answering support email for OmniGraffle and listening politely to people who like to talk about World of Warcraft. Paul also enjoys music with handclaps and harmonies, playing pinball, and Bob Clampett's cartoons. Sometimes he wishes it could be 1965 again.

• Kris Rapp

  

  Kris’s reputation has a tendency of preceding him — he earned the nickname ‘Hollywood’ from the Omni Group in his first week, without any early indication of Diva-like behavior. He admits that it was a fair assumption to make given his penchant for irony and glamor; Kris hails from Los Angeles, where both are abundant (and not mutually exclusive). Currently pursuing his black belt in Support Ninja Aikido, he’s greeting the challenge in the same way he is assimilating to life in Seattle: with a sunny disposition and routine doses of Vitamin D.

• Derek Reiff

  

  In college, Derek did something with computers and journalism and running. Now, of course, he's in Seattle. (Because why not?)

  His recent projects include trying to persuade others to go halves on a sailboat, drinking latte after latte, and building keg-o-rators designed for extra foam.

  He also has a very emotional dog, Jadys, is looking to sell the ebook reader he's holding, and invites your Tetris challenges.

  Oh yeah, he's one of the guys taking your tech support calls, too.

• Monica Rochester

  

  Monica is an ex-Southerner who, when not solving OmniOutliner mysteries, collects old and weird books, creates collages, tends to cacti and succulents, and enjoys lots of hugs from her Italian Greyhound, Sir Maus. Also likes commas.

User Experience

• William Van Hecke — User Experience Lead

  

  "User Experience Lead" is the nebulous job of making software civilized enough to bring out in public. This involves lots of squinting six inches away from the Cinema Display at 3200% zoom and consulting etymology dictionaries to properly label buttons. It often ends up entwined with documentation, marketing, quality assurance, customer support, and Dungeon Mastering too.

  Bill has lived near Chicago, where he wrote odd code for companies on the Board of Trade, and in Green Bay, where he operated nocturnally for a year. He also spends a prodigious amount of time in Tokyo, and has learned exotic foreign languages such as Dvorak, Python, and New Standard Tuning.

  When not shoveling pixels or graphemes, Bill likes creating video games, translating video games, and, occasionally, playing video games.

• Joel Page

  
  From a variety of far-away desert lands, former famous pizza delivery driver Joel came to Omni by way of the United States Army and an unfortunate stint in commercial printing.
   
  When he's not busy brewing and drinking coffee, he tends to make buttons for inspectors in OmniGraffle, along with whatever other product manager-y chores for OmniGraffle come his way.
   
  Joel also has a number of enormously long eyebrow hairs.