Brief History of Me

My name is Reza Naima, I live in San Fracisco with my dog, Kepler. After acquiring my BS in Bioengineering from University of California, San Diego in '96, I decided rather than pursuing my original goal of medical school (and yes, I did get accepted), I would do some work on Computers.

My first job was at Cisco Systems running web security in the system administration team. Although I had no experience in compute security, all it took was using some common sense -- something that developers at cisco seemed to lack. I only spent a year there till I got bored, then hit Western Europe for a few months. Since then I've worked at a few more startups and traveled quite a bit more. /p>

In 2001 I gave up on making my millions off an IPO and I quit my job at Mark Andreson's Loudcloud company. It was a pretty fun day -- I ditched work with a friend to go watch a car race at Sears Point and I quit over the cell with cars roaring in the background.

A few weeks later conviced another coworker that he should quit as well and that we should do hardware instead. The thought was to bulid a data aquisition device for bicyclists. We spent a year teaching ourselfs embedded systems and moved into a corner of an office near the train station in San Francisco. It took us a lot longer than expected to come up with a working device (mostly due to my unamed (*cough*jake*cough) partner spending more time checking out www.ismykittyhotornot.com than actually doing any work). But we did it, and it worked. But we didn't know what to do next so we moved on.

The year working wasn't a waste however, as I walked away with a fairly solid understanding of digital electronics and embedded systems. It wasn't long before I was approached by a company that wanted me to build an interfaces to talk to the OBD2 port of contemporary vehicles. However, they really had no idea what they were doing, feature creep became a huge problem, and they ended up having all sort of issues (though my hardware/firmware was solid). I'm not sure what happened to them, but they were a great example of what not to do (with your father-in-laws money).

About a year later, I was hit by a drunk driver doing over 60 while I was on a bicycle. I was helicoptered to the hospital and narrowly avoided serious brain injury.  Working on car diagnostics became a lot less interesting, work was getting dull, and I didnt want anther 9-5 job so I thought about graduate school. And that's what I did.

I'm in my 4th year in the Joint UC Berkeley & UC San Franscisco Group in Bioengineering working on a PhD with an emphasis on health care technologies. After posting a demo on youtube, I was approached by many companies and individuals that were supported and interested in the project -- which is way cool. That's basically what I'm doing now.

Other Stuff

I'm a snob when it comes to coffee and tequila, I like to brew my own beer, and make things in general. I love to cook for, and to entertain friends, and to listen to Depeche Mode. I hate iTunes and apple's insistance that the end user is a moron, though I love my iPhone. I'm a libertarian at heart and am amazed at the stupidity of the masses (i.e. the midwest's beief of the president's rhetoric). The odds of dying from a terrorist attack globaly are less than the odds of death by lightning strike, yet we have to have our shoes x-rayed and told that we're constantly at risk. I wonder why the government isn't as proactive against threats that are potentially significantly more lethal, like bad drivers?