Robert Firmin
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Robert (Rob) Firmin is an entrepreneur/inventor and artist living in Berkeley, California.
Firmin's first entrepreneurial company was Javelin Software Corporation, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His concepts for Javelin were based on his PhD work in demography and time series modeling at the University of Chicago, his MBA in finance from Columbia University and his experiences as head of financial planning at Prime Computer and CFO of Computer Pictures. He realized that the iterative discovery of which variables are important in any analysis or plan and how those variables interact provide many times the information to management that any set of computed numbers ever could. He also realized the criticality of calendar time, time-based relationships between variables, the documentation of all model logic and data sources, and independence of data from worksheets. Firmin addressed all of these issues with Javelin.
After Javelin, Firmin created a number of inventions, including a radically different bicycle saddle, a fast data retrieval method, an early GPS/analog cell phone, and worked on aerodynamics improvements for automobiles and bicycles. As of 2004 he was working on a new software concept, and had become a realist-figurative sculptor.
