Wes Boyd (born c.1960) is an American software developer and political organizer. In 1987, he and his wife Joan Blades co-founded

Berkeley Systems Berkeley Systems was a San Francisco Bay Area software company co-founded in 1987 by Wes Boyd and Joan Blades. It made money early on by performing contract work for the National Institutes of Health, specifically in making modifications to th ...

, a

San Francisco Bay area The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a List of regions of California, region of California surrounding and including San Francisco Bay, and anchored by the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose, California, S ...

software company.Bozman, Jean S. (1990)
Macs talk to visually impaired
, ''

Computerworld ''Computerworld'' (abbreviated as CW) is a computer magazine published since 1967 aimed at information technology (IT) and Business computing, business technology professionals. Original a print magazine, ''Computerworld'' published its final pr ...

'', June 4, 1990. Retrieved November 16, 2013 After selling the company in 1997, Boyd and Blades went on to found the liberal political group MoveOn.org in 1998.Crumlish, Christian ''The Power of Many: How the Living Web Is Transforming Politics, Business, And Everyday Life'', Sybex, , p. 30

Early life and education

He was born in 1960. Native to

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

, he was active with computers at age 14, then later dropped out of college to pursue his interest in software design.

Career

Berkeley Systems

He was a programmer at the University of California Berkeley for several years. Afterwards, he created software for PC users who were visually impaired. In 1987 he founded

with Joan Blades, with Boyd serving as technical expert and CEO. In 1990, he was Berkeley Systems president, and had been working with Marc Sutton on software to aid sight-impaired computer users. It was also selling mass-market Mac utilities. In the early 1990s, Boyd's popular screen saver bundle had brought in several millions of dollars. By the end of the 1990s, he left that business, and became politically active. By the late 1990s, the company employed 150 people and made around $30 million a year in sales. He sold the company to

CUC International CUC (Comp-U-Card) International Inc. was a membership-based consumer services conglomerate with travel, shopping, auto, dining, home improvement and financial services offered to more than 60 million customers worldwide based in Stamford, Connect ...

for $25 million in 1997.

MoveOn.org

He and his wife Joan Blades in 1998 founded MoveOn.org online. A one-sentence petition to move on from the Clinton scandal was first sent to several-hundred friends and family, and "very shortly" they had half a million people involved. The email involved a simple online submission form. The site moveon.org appeared September 18, 1998 with the sole purpose of building a petition to express disapproval of Bill Clinton, call for a "quick censure" and move on to other issues. Boyd and Blades styled it as a "flash campaign." When the signatures were collected, Boyd and Blades printed out 20,000 pages of email and had them hand-delivered to every member of the House of Congress. By 1999, the organization had raised $12 million in pledges to congressional campaigns of people who had not voted in favor of impeachment. It did so through the PAC MoveOn Political Action Committee. In 2000, the organization petitioned Ralph Nader to drop out of the 2000 presidential race so he wouldn't draw votes from

Al Gore Albert Arnold Gore Jr. (born March 31, 1948) is an American former politician, businessman, and environmentalist who served as the 45th vice president of the United States from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. He previously served as ...

. In 2002, they supported

Paul Wellstone Paul David Wellstone (July 21, 1944 – October 25, 2002) was an American academic, author, and politician who represented Minnesota in the United States Senate from 1991 until he was killed in a plane crash near Eveleth, Minnesota, in 2002. A m ...

. In 2004, Boyd and Blades were named NPT Executives of the Year by the ''Nonprofit Times''. By 2008, it had an email list of 4.2 million names and had donated $118 million into political matters, such as "opposing U.S. involvement in the Iraq war, supporting an unregulated Internet and helping hurricane victims find temporary housing, among other activities. The group runs ads on television, on the Internet and in newspapers and magazines."

Personal life

Boyd is married to Joan Blades, also his long-term business partner. They have two children and live in Berkeley.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Boyd, Wes Living people Year of birth missing (living people)