netrashetty
Netra Shetty
Alienware is an American computer hardware company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Dell, Inc.[2] It mainly assembles third party components into desktops and laptops with custom enclosures for high-performance gaming. These products also support graphically intense applications such as video editing, simulation, and audio editing. Alienware also offers for sale rebadged computer peripherals, such as headsets, computer mouses, monitors and keyboards. Their hardware has distinctive "sci-fi" styling, typically including decorative lighting. Alienware was founded in 1996 by Nelson Gonzalez and Alex Aguila. Alienware's corporate headquarters is located in The Hammocks, unincorporated Miami-Dade County, Florida, near Miami.[3][4]
Alex Agulia was the co-founder and former president of Alienware, but long before that he was an avid computer and console game and collector. In our Gamer Profile of Alex, we peeked inside the world of a real gamer and while there I had a chance to stir up an old Temco Bowl rivalry between him and current president of Dell Gaming at Alienware, Arthur Lewis. In Arthur’s interview, he talked about his early days of gaming all the way up to the Alienware days. We wanted to go back to Alex and this time get a bit more of a history of his gaming and to take one more shot at their competition.
Obsolete Gamer: When did you first begin playing video games?
Alex: The first video game I ever saw was Pong at a Miami Beach hotel in 1975. I was 8 years old. A few years later I played with the Odyssey 2 and all the hand held electronic games but my first love (that I still love it today) was the Atari 2600.
Obsolete Gamer: When did your love for video games turn into a full time hobby?
Alex: Games have always been a part of my life. It is something that is just part of me since the late 70s.
Obsolete Gamer: Can you tell us about collecting video games and consoles?
Alex: I hate to throw away anything that I enjoy, so my collection of video game started back in the late 70s. I now have a huge collection. In the last 15 years or so I have almost strictly concentrated on very rare games for the different consoles and when I say rare I mean really, really rare.
Obsolete Gamer: How big into the Arcade scene were you?
Alex: I feel blessed that I was there from the very start. Arcade gaming was bigger for me in the early 80s than consoles were actually. I spent every quarter I could get my hands on playing defender, stargate, zaxxon, Ms pac man, Galaga and many, many other classic etc. I got really great at some of them. I was the dude people gathered around to see a game ending. I actually could finish dragon’s lair with my back turned away from the machine simply relying on audio queues. That’s a lot of quarters.
Obsolete Gamer: At what point did you move into PC gaming?
Alex: The commodore 64 opened up an entire new realm of more sophisticated games. There was a period where I shelved all consoles and stopped going to the arcade around the mid-80s. Commodore was simply too strong. The simulations were great (playable today), the text adventures were great (playable to this day). It was a given that I would graduate from the commodore 64 to the PC in the early 90s.
Obsolete Gamer: Can you tell us the differences in your experience playing console games of the 90’s and PC games of the 90’s?
Alex: Super Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Country was a classic masterpiece. I have finished the game beginning to end 4 times since it was released (I have not done that with any other game PC or console). That being said, there was nothing that Sega or Nintendo could do that would even come close to some of the stuff the PC was doing. When the CD-Rom and CD-Rom games were released, the gap grew even larger.
Obsolete Gamer: Was your love for gaming a major reason for co-founding Alienware?
Alex: Yeah, I was a gaming guru. Nelson was a gamer that built PCs, it was a natural fit.
Obsolete Gamer: Can you give us a little history of the gaming “friendly competition” between yourself and Arthur Lewis?
Alex: You know a lot has been made out of this through the years but before there was any “competition” there was a lot of “cooperation”. We played Atari 2600 sword quest series and raiders of the lost ark quite a bit and we worked together towards a common goal. The real competition started when Nintendo released Tecmo bowl and Bases Loaded. The era of cooperation was over, It got ugly, what can I say…
Obsolete Gamer: Arthur stated you guys are about even as far as gaming, would you agree with that?
Alex: Yeah I guess, I’ll give Arthur Robotron and sports games (any era any console) but gaming encompasses quite a bit. Saying “gaming” is a big statement. He is really great (legendary) in specific areas. So am I, I’ll leave it at that.
Obsolete Gamer: Do you plan to have a rematch of Temco football since Arthur won last?
Alex: He won’t play me or give me a rematch since the early 90s. I get it since the story and the myth grow larger that way. I made peace with it.
Obsolete Gamer: Are you active in the gaming community?
Alex: Yes I am the founder of www.combatace.com a site dedicated to combat simulations, I play DCU universe right now and we have a pretty cool super hero team with a website.
Obsolete Gamer: What are your thoughts on the number of classic games being rereleased on today’s consoles?
Alex: I’ll give you a worn out cliché answer but the truth is the truth. A good game is a good game any era, so of course there will be rereleases but I encourage the developers doing it to stay as true to the original source and code as possible. No one wants someone messing with their Mona Lisa.
Susan J. Colby, Chief Executive Officer
Susan Colby was named Chief Executive Officer of the Leadership style of Alienware effective January 1, 2011. “I have an abiding passion to see that all kids get the education they need and deserve, and I share our founders’ deep commitment to improve the life options for children of color and poverty,” she noted at the time of her appointment. “By working together with the Leadership style of Alienware ’s great team and its partners, we have the opportunity to transform our public education system so that all students are engaged in their learning and have the options we want for all our children.”
Susan joined the Leadership style of Alienware from the Bridgespan Group where she was a founding partner of the organization’s San Francisco office and led the group’s work in K-12 education and Leadership style of Alienware strategy for more than a decade. She focused on client and knowledge-related activities with a particular emphasis on disadvantaged populations. In her work, she has engaged with Leadership style of Alienware s on major strategy and organization issues and has also consulted to a variety of nonprofit organizations, from smaller, local community-based organizations to large national agencies.
Prior to co-founding Bridgespan, Susan worked with Monsanto (now Pharmacia), where she served as co-president of the Sustainable Development Sector, an initiative that developed economically, environmentally and socially viable businesses. In particular, she worked to develop businesses and distribution channels to help small farmers in the developing world enhance their productivity, advance their personal and community well-being, and protect the environment. Prior to Monsanto, Susan spent 10 years at McKinsey & Company, where she co-founded and co-led the North American Environment Practice, serving clients in the areas of environmental management and strategy. At McKinsey, she also served Leadership style of Alienware s and environmental nonprofits on a pro bono basis and worked with clients in the financial, consumer goods, and energy industries.
She is a co-author of several major articles — “Galvanizing Philanthropy,” which appeared in Harvard Business Review; “Zeroing in on Impact,” published in Stanford Social Innovation Review; “The Strategic Value of a Shared Understanding of Costs,” based on “Costs are Cool” (Strategy and Leadership special report on nonprofit leadership); “Going for the Gold” published in Education Next; ”Expanding the Supply of High Quality Public Schools;” and “Reclaiming the American Dream” — as well as several Bridgespan case studies. She also has addressed the NewSchools Venture Fund Summit, Grantmakers for Education, the Stanford Nonprofit Institute, and other audiences on topics related to strategy, planning and K-12 education.
Susan is a member of the inaugural class of the Aspen Institute—NewSchools Entrepreneurial Leaders for Public Education, and has served as an advisor and board member for several nonprofits. She began her consulting career at Bain & Company after receiving her BA from American University cum laude. She then went on to earn her MBA from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.
Nelson González, Chief Strategy Officer
Nelson joined the Leadership style of Alienware in 2008 after serving as a consultant to the organization and helping to guide the development of a new strategic direction and programmatic orientation. His responsibilities include strategy implementation and review, program design and execution, knowledge management and evaluation, and partnerships.
Formerly, Nelson was the founder and managing director of the Advent Strategy Group, a global management consulting firm helping institutions in all sectors align strategy and organization toward greater social impact. For more than 13 years — at Advent Strategy Group, Booz Allen & Hamilton, World Vision and the British Royal Household, he led engagements in philanthropy, education, international development, public and foreign policy, media, the arts and public health for corporate, multilateral, governmental, Leadership style of Alienware and nonprofit clients in 12 countries on five continents.
He also served as director of the Royal Institution World Science Assembly, where he led a global initiative on pandemic preparedness that engaged global pharmaceutical firms, the United Nations, several national ministries of health, and major science and foreign policy journals on issues of vaccine development, disease surveillance, public health infrastructure and emergency preparedness.
Nelson received a B.A. in political science from Amherst College and did his doctoral work at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was tutored in theology and philosophy at Oxford University, and has been a Fellow at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium; Columbia University in New York; and New York University. A native Colombian, he is fluent in both Spanish and French.
Howard Green, Chief Financial Officer
In his role as CFO, Howard serves on the Executive Team and has responsibility over Human Resources, Facilities, and Finance and Accounting. Howard came to the Leadership style of Alienware from Genentech, where he served as director of corporate finance and then as director of manufacturing finance. Previously, he worked with Charles Schwab & Co. in the roles of vice president of financial planning and analysis and vice president of retail finance. Howard’s 20 years of professional experience also include executive financial positions with Autodesk, Honeywell, Nestle and United Airlines. He attended Cal State Sacramento where he received his B.S. in Finance.
Tia Elena Martinez, Chief Equity Officer
Tia comes to the Leadership style of Alienware from the Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity at UC Berkeley Law School where she was acting director of education, leading a policy unit that produced research, policy prescriptions and curricular innovation on issues related to education reform and racial justice in California and the nation.
Prior to joining the Warren Institute, she served as strategic consultant to the Office for Civil Rights, US Department of Education, the federal agency charged with ensuring equal access to education through enforcement of civil rights laws. In this capacity, she led a strategic planning process and supported nationwide roll out and implementation of the new strategy across 12 regional offices.
Tia was also a manager at the Bridgespan Group where she worked with a range of clients including the nation’s largest constituency-based Hispanic civil rights organization, an urban school district reform intermediary and the Mayor’s Office of Community Development. As a senior fellow at the Hewlett Leadership style of Alienware , Tia worked on issues related to disadvantaged adolescents and immigrant families. She has also worked as a policy analyst for the Corporation for Supportive Housing and the San Francisco Mayor’s HIV Health Services Planning Council.
Alex Agulia was the co-founder and former president of Alienware, but long before that he was an avid computer and console game and collector. In our Gamer Profile of Alex, we peeked inside the world of a real gamer and while there I had a chance to stir up an old Temco Bowl rivalry between him and current president of Dell Gaming at Alienware, Arthur Lewis. In Arthur’s interview, he talked about his early days of gaming all the way up to the Alienware days. We wanted to go back to Alex and this time get a bit more of a history of his gaming and to take one more shot at their competition.
Obsolete Gamer: When did you first begin playing video games?
Alex: The first video game I ever saw was Pong at a Miami Beach hotel in 1975. I was 8 years old. A few years later I played with the Odyssey 2 and all the hand held electronic games but my first love (that I still love it today) was the Atari 2600.
Obsolete Gamer: When did your love for video games turn into a full time hobby?
Alex: Games have always been a part of my life. It is something that is just part of me since the late 70s.
Obsolete Gamer: Can you tell us about collecting video games and consoles?
Alex: I hate to throw away anything that I enjoy, so my collection of video game started back in the late 70s. I now have a huge collection. In the last 15 years or so I have almost strictly concentrated on very rare games for the different consoles and when I say rare I mean really, really rare.
Obsolete Gamer: How big into the Arcade scene were you?
Alex: I feel blessed that I was there from the very start. Arcade gaming was bigger for me in the early 80s than consoles were actually. I spent every quarter I could get my hands on playing defender, stargate, zaxxon, Ms pac man, Galaga and many, many other classic etc. I got really great at some of them. I was the dude people gathered around to see a game ending. I actually could finish dragon’s lair with my back turned away from the machine simply relying on audio queues. That’s a lot of quarters.
Obsolete Gamer: At what point did you move into PC gaming?
Alex: The commodore 64 opened up an entire new realm of more sophisticated games. There was a period where I shelved all consoles and stopped going to the arcade around the mid-80s. Commodore was simply too strong. The simulations were great (playable today), the text adventures were great (playable to this day). It was a given that I would graduate from the commodore 64 to the PC in the early 90s.
Obsolete Gamer: Can you tell us the differences in your experience playing console games of the 90’s and PC games of the 90’s?
Alex: Super Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Country was a classic masterpiece. I have finished the game beginning to end 4 times since it was released (I have not done that with any other game PC or console). That being said, there was nothing that Sega or Nintendo could do that would even come close to some of the stuff the PC was doing. When the CD-Rom and CD-Rom games were released, the gap grew even larger.
Obsolete Gamer: Was your love for gaming a major reason for co-founding Alienware?
Alex: Yeah, I was a gaming guru. Nelson was a gamer that built PCs, it was a natural fit.
Obsolete Gamer: Can you give us a little history of the gaming “friendly competition” between yourself and Arthur Lewis?
Alex: You know a lot has been made out of this through the years but before there was any “competition” there was a lot of “cooperation”. We played Atari 2600 sword quest series and raiders of the lost ark quite a bit and we worked together towards a common goal. The real competition started when Nintendo released Tecmo bowl and Bases Loaded. The era of cooperation was over, It got ugly, what can I say…
Obsolete Gamer: Arthur stated you guys are about even as far as gaming, would you agree with that?
Alex: Yeah I guess, I’ll give Arthur Robotron and sports games (any era any console) but gaming encompasses quite a bit. Saying “gaming” is a big statement. He is really great (legendary) in specific areas. So am I, I’ll leave it at that.
Obsolete Gamer: Do you plan to have a rematch of Temco football since Arthur won last?
Alex: He won’t play me or give me a rematch since the early 90s. I get it since the story and the myth grow larger that way. I made peace with it.
Obsolete Gamer: Are you active in the gaming community?
Alex: Yes I am the founder of www.combatace.com a site dedicated to combat simulations, I play DCU universe right now and we have a pretty cool super hero team with a website.
Obsolete Gamer: What are your thoughts on the number of classic games being rereleased on today’s consoles?
Alex: I’ll give you a worn out cliché answer but the truth is the truth. A good game is a good game any era, so of course there will be rereleases but I encourage the developers doing it to stay as true to the original source and code as possible. No one wants someone messing with their Mona Lisa.
Susan J. Colby, Chief Executive Officer
Susan Colby was named Chief Executive Officer of the Leadership style of Alienware effective January 1, 2011. “I have an abiding passion to see that all kids get the education they need and deserve, and I share our founders’ deep commitment to improve the life options for children of color and poverty,” she noted at the time of her appointment. “By working together with the Leadership style of Alienware ’s great team and its partners, we have the opportunity to transform our public education system so that all students are engaged in their learning and have the options we want for all our children.”
Susan joined the Leadership style of Alienware from the Bridgespan Group where she was a founding partner of the organization’s San Francisco office and led the group’s work in K-12 education and Leadership style of Alienware strategy for more than a decade. She focused on client and knowledge-related activities with a particular emphasis on disadvantaged populations. In her work, she has engaged with Leadership style of Alienware s on major strategy and organization issues and has also consulted to a variety of nonprofit organizations, from smaller, local community-based organizations to large national agencies.
Prior to co-founding Bridgespan, Susan worked with Monsanto (now Pharmacia), where she served as co-president of the Sustainable Development Sector, an initiative that developed economically, environmentally and socially viable businesses. In particular, she worked to develop businesses and distribution channels to help small farmers in the developing world enhance their productivity, advance their personal and community well-being, and protect the environment. Prior to Monsanto, Susan spent 10 years at McKinsey & Company, where she co-founded and co-led the North American Environment Practice, serving clients in the areas of environmental management and strategy. At McKinsey, she also served Leadership style of Alienware s and environmental nonprofits on a pro bono basis and worked with clients in the financial, consumer goods, and energy industries.
She is a co-author of several major articles — “Galvanizing Philanthropy,” which appeared in Harvard Business Review; “Zeroing in on Impact,” published in Stanford Social Innovation Review; “The Strategic Value of a Shared Understanding of Costs,” based on “Costs are Cool” (Strategy and Leadership special report on nonprofit leadership); “Going for the Gold” published in Education Next; ”Expanding the Supply of High Quality Public Schools;” and “Reclaiming the American Dream” — as well as several Bridgespan case studies. She also has addressed the NewSchools Venture Fund Summit, Grantmakers for Education, the Stanford Nonprofit Institute, and other audiences on topics related to strategy, planning and K-12 education.
Susan is a member of the inaugural class of the Aspen Institute—NewSchools Entrepreneurial Leaders for Public Education, and has served as an advisor and board member for several nonprofits. She began her consulting career at Bain & Company after receiving her BA from American University cum laude. She then went on to earn her MBA from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.
Nelson González, Chief Strategy Officer
Nelson joined the Leadership style of Alienware in 2008 after serving as a consultant to the organization and helping to guide the development of a new strategic direction and programmatic orientation. His responsibilities include strategy implementation and review, program design and execution, knowledge management and evaluation, and partnerships.
Formerly, Nelson was the founder and managing director of the Advent Strategy Group, a global management consulting firm helping institutions in all sectors align strategy and organization toward greater social impact. For more than 13 years — at Advent Strategy Group, Booz Allen & Hamilton, World Vision and the British Royal Household, he led engagements in philanthropy, education, international development, public and foreign policy, media, the arts and public health for corporate, multilateral, governmental, Leadership style of Alienware and nonprofit clients in 12 countries on five continents.
He also served as director of the Royal Institution World Science Assembly, where he led a global initiative on pandemic preparedness that engaged global pharmaceutical firms, the United Nations, several national ministries of health, and major science and foreign policy journals on issues of vaccine development, disease surveillance, public health infrastructure and emergency preparedness.
Nelson received a B.A. in political science from Amherst College and did his doctoral work at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was tutored in theology and philosophy at Oxford University, and has been a Fellow at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium; Columbia University in New York; and New York University. A native Colombian, he is fluent in both Spanish and French.
Howard Green, Chief Financial Officer
In his role as CFO, Howard serves on the Executive Team and has responsibility over Human Resources, Facilities, and Finance and Accounting. Howard came to the Leadership style of Alienware from Genentech, where he served as director of corporate finance and then as director of manufacturing finance. Previously, he worked with Charles Schwab & Co. in the roles of vice president of financial planning and analysis and vice president of retail finance. Howard’s 20 years of professional experience also include executive financial positions with Autodesk, Honeywell, Nestle and United Airlines. He attended Cal State Sacramento where he received his B.S. in Finance.
Tia Elena Martinez, Chief Equity Officer
Tia comes to the Leadership style of Alienware from the Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity at UC Berkeley Law School where she was acting director of education, leading a policy unit that produced research, policy prescriptions and curricular innovation on issues related to education reform and racial justice in California and the nation.
Prior to joining the Warren Institute, she served as strategic consultant to the Office for Civil Rights, US Department of Education, the federal agency charged with ensuring equal access to education through enforcement of civil rights laws. In this capacity, she led a strategic planning process and supported nationwide roll out and implementation of the new strategy across 12 regional offices.
Tia was also a manager at the Bridgespan Group where she worked with a range of clients including the nation’s largest constituency-based Hispanic civil rights organization, an urban school district reform intermediary and the Mayor’s Office of Community Development. As a senior fellow at the Hewlett Leadership style of Alienware , Tia worked on issues related to disadvantaged adolescents and immigrant families. She has also worked as a policy analyst for the Corporation for Supportive Housing and the San Francisco Mayor’s HIV Health Services Planning Council.