Jim Rutt (born 1954) is an American businessman and entrepreneur, the former CEO of Network Solutions, and the former chairman of the

Santa Fe Institute The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, inclu ...

Early life

In 1975, Rutt received a bachelor's degree in

management Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a Government agency, government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includ ...

from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. He later ran technology operations for

Thomson Corporation The Thomson Corporation was one of the world's largest information companies. It was established in 1989 following a merger between International Thomson Organisation Ltd (ITOL) and Thomson Newspapers. In 2008, it purchased Reuters Group to fo ...

Business career

Rutt was the CEO of Network Solutions, an American technology and Internet company. He was hired in 1999 during the

dot-com boom The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compos ...

, and negotiated the company's $15 billion acquisition by

Verisign Verisign Inc. is an American company based in Reston, Virginia, United States that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the , , and gene ...

, where it continued operating as an independent subsidiary. In March 2001, after the acquisition, he subsequently stepped down from his position as a Verisign executive. After retiring, New Mexico governor

Bill Richardson William Blaine Richardson III (born November 15, 1947) is an American politician, author, and diplomat who served as the 30th governor of New Mexico from 2003 to 2011. He was also the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Energy Secretary ...

appointed Rutt to serve on the State Investment Council. In 2014, Rutt co-founded a

makerspace A hackerspace (also referred to as a hacklab, hackspace, or makerspace) is a community-operated, often "not for profit" ( 501(c)(3) in the United States), workspace where people with common interests, such as computers, machining, technology, ...

in Staunton, Virginia with software engineer Dan Funk.

Activities

In 1981, Rutt was the first to use the term "

snail mail The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letters, and parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid-19th century, national postal sy ...

" to describe conventional

mail The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letters, and parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid-19th century, national postal sys ...

services, in contrast with

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

. Rutt is a trustee of the

, a multi-disciplinary research organization, and was its chairman before retiring in 2012. He does research into the scientific study of

consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...

and

artificial general intelligence Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. It is a primary goal of some artificial intelligence research and a common topic in science fictio ...

. He hosts a podcast called
The Jim Rutt Show
'.

References

External links

The Jim Rutt Show

Lifeboat Foundation biography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rutt, Jim Living people American computer businesspeople American technology chief executives American technology company founders 1954 births Santa Fe Institute people MIT Sloan School of Management alumni