Joe Pantuso is the founder of Pantuso Ventures, LLC. He is CEO of Fortezza Technology and CTO of BlackBook EMG and host of Ignite Cincinnati.
Joe enjoys technology, programming and entrepreneurship and likes to share his experiences and help individuals and companies grow. Joe is an active startup advocate, advisor, technology advisor and speaker located in the Cincinnati, Ohio, USA area.
Joe has four patents and three published books. His hobbies are startups, agile development practices, and cooking.
You can find Joe on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Detailed Bio:
After contributing to the .zip file format standard and PKLite and PKZip products for two years, Joe left PKWare Inc. in 1993 to form his first company, Renegade Graphics. At Renegade, Joe wrote and published the first Windows-based commercially successful video game CAD software used to edit levels for the best-selling Doom video game and its sequels. Joe then leveraged his technical knowledge of video game level editing and design to publish his first book.
In 1995, Joe formed a joint venture between Renegade Graphics and Sembawang Media (a division of SembCorp); Games Online, the first video game studio established in the country of Singapore. As the leader of Games Online, Joe envisioned some of the earliest multi-player Internet games. He also authored two more books on the subject of the Internet and the growing online gaming phenomenon and lectured on these topics at a Singaporean Polytechnic school.
In 1997, Joe returned to the United States to co-found NeoWorx Inc. with a former PKWare colleague. Serving as Vice President and CTO of NeoWorx, Joe initiated and oversaw the creation of multiple innovative security products, including the graphical NeoTrace trace-route tool, NeoLite executable protection technology, and the NeoWatch personal firewall. Joe also created HackerWatch, a security aggregation system which collected and analyzed event data from the NeoWatch personal firewall product and scored early wins with the detection of the CodeRed II Internet worm within hours of initial outbreak.
In 2001, NeoWorx was acquired by McAfee, best known for their anti-virus products. After the acquisition, Joe led the transition of the NeoWorx development team as the NeoWatch firewall was adapted to become the next-generation McAfee Personal Firewall product. During this time Joe authored four patents covering portions of the NeoTrace and NeoWatch firewall technology he originated. The User Interface standards and baseline technology created by Joe and his team at NeoWorx still set the look and feel of McAfee products today. During his tenure at McAfee he led the Personal Firewall, Privacy and AOL security suite product development efforts.
In 2004, a new company, TrayGames, was founded by Joe to explore and realize his concept of a service to provide easy access to multi-player Casual games. Joe used his prior experience in security and large scale software delivery to architect and lead the creation of a highly and rapidly scalable yet low-cost infrastructure capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of players simultaneously. He also architected an API and test-harness that made it possible to develop client and server on a single desktop while simulating the back end infrastructure that hosts the server logic. Nearly a dozen games were developed and published under his direction.
In 2007, Joe was approached by Draper Triangle Ventures, a DFJ Network Partner, to join one of their venture-backed firms and lead the creation of a new product, team and culture to support it.
Most recently Joe founded Fortezza Technology, an Internet Security startup currently in development, while driving the technology behind CincyTech portfolio company Blackbook EMG. He is also responsible for bringing Ignite to Cincinnati, and is one of the co-founders of Secret Cincinnati.