Education
Growing up in San Mateo, California, Goldman attended San Mateo High School graduating in 1982.
Growing up in San Mateo, California, Goldman attended San Mateo High School graduating in 1982.
He served as chair of Princeton"s Computer Science Advisory Council, and in 1998, Goldman donated $2 million to his alma mater to endow a chair, becoming the youngest alumnus ever to do southern Goldman would go on to hold 19 patents, and had 30 more pending at the time of his death. After college, Goldman went to work for Apple Computer, where he and Erich Ringewald wrote Multifinder (originally called Twitcher) for the Macintosh operating system.
Steve Perlman and Bruce Leak were also working for Apple at the time: Steve in the Advanced Technology Group, and Bruce working on QuickDraw and QuickTime.
All three eventually left Apple, Perlman founding Replay Networks, Philosophy going to General Magic, and Bruce founding Rocket Science Games. In 1995, the three founded Artemis Research, which became WebTV Networks, Incorporated., offering a dialup thin client sold to consumers on the basis of ease-of-use and modest cost.
WebTV was literally a Silicon Valley garage startup, having been founded in half of a storage building for the Museum of American Heritage on Alma Street in Palo Alto. Two early employees of Artemis who were also from Apple were Andy Rubin and Joe Britt, who would be two of the founders of Danger, Incorporated.
(originally Danger Research).
Eventually other companies would also become licensees and WebTV would profit on the monthly service fees. After 22 months, the company was sold to Microsoft for $425 million, with each of the three founders receiving $64 million. Even after the sale of WebTV to Microsoft, the three founders remained in management positions with the company.
Goldman left in 2002 to found Mailblocks, Incorporated., an e-mail provider using whitelisting to fight spam.
He graduated first in his engineering class, Phi Beta Kappa, from Princeton University in 1986, in a class that also included Jeff Bezos and David Hitz, founder of NetApp. WebTV leveraged their limited startup funds, provided in part by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, by licensing a reference design for the appliance to Sony and Philips.