The Partners of Hunter Strategies have been involved with technology based companies for over forty years. Jim Becker built products using the first Intel microprocessor, the 4004 and is currently advising software companies using MongoDB and React. Mimi Macksoud taught computer programming at Pratt & Whitney and has advised tech based companies on their marketing and M&A activities.
Jim spent ten years at DEC. As Product Manager for High End Memories, he established memories as the highest margin product that DEC offered, selling 64MB memory arrays for $10,000 a megabyte. As Product Manager for Argonaut, a mid-range VAX being developed, he was an introduced to the detailed aspects of systems development and the variety of tasks that need to come together to have a successful product introduction. The Argonaut system development was stopped in favor of the the VAX 9000, one of the major mistakes that lead to the demise of DEC. Jim then became Group Product Manager for Workstations, a $1.5B annual revenue business. Jim grew the Product Management team to 60 people and oversaw the introduction of 16 new computer systems in a four year period.
EPS was investigating possible approaches to achieving nuclear fusion using powerful electric arcs. Jim’s initial involvement with EPS began as an effort to raise additional funding which resulted in a million dollar investment. As the health of EPS’s founder and engineering head declined, Jim assumed day to day program management duties working closely with the chief nuclear scientist to have new equipment fabricated and new experiments designed. This involved working with 1,000 amp arcs, cameras that ran at 100,000 frames per second and spectroscopes that could measure picometer shifts in various wavelengths. Eventually Jim coordinated with Brookhaven National Labs to design a further set of experiments using the particle accelerators at Brookhaven. The experiments were sucessful in that they determined that the EPS process would produce fusion but had no possibility of getting to breakeven let alone producing useful energy. However, some of the concepts that came out of this research are still being developed and may yet play an important role in fusion research. Jim oversaw the windup of the company and the donation of the lab equipment to a local university.
