Aidan Cunniffe, a former Whitman student, and CEO and founder of San Francisco based Optic, will visit the LaunchPad in Bird Library on Friday, February 28 at 2 p.m. to share his story. Optic is a version control and continuous integration for APIs, which can monitor real traffic to make sure every published API follows its specification, making it easy to document APIs with an auditable workflow that helps account for every API change.
Previously he was co-founder, CEO and president of Dropsource (Queue Software), a Raleigh-Durham based mobile app development platform to help professional development teams design, build and ship high-quality native iOS and Android Apps. Cunniffe founded the company while in college and raised $10M in venture funding. He attended Syracuse from 2012 to 2014, studying entrepreneurship. In 2013 he won first place in the Raymond von Dran iPrize Award for information technology and went on to compete in the New York State Business Competition.
An August 2014 Whitman Voices article by Byron Delarosa tells the story of Aidan coming to Syracuse with a background starting ventures before coming to college, including founding a non-profit. By 2013 he teamed with Nate Frechette, a Le Moyne senior at the time, who would eventually partner to start Queue. Nate and Aidan built a location based social networking app called Droppin, which developed a fanbase during basketball season. The story goes that the RvD iPrize judges disliked their App but loved their team chemistry. That led to a new concept for automating computer programming leading to their concept to automate the development of highly complex mobile apps. They filed patents and raised capital to open in Raleigh, NC, leaving college to supercharge the company.
At the time he said that it was great to know that no matter what happened, the Whitman community would welcome him back with open arms.
Come join him and learn about his journey.