Business & Tech

Former Gates Assistant Launches Kirkland Startup

Alex Gounares resigned in February as chief of technology for Patch parent company AOL and spent three years as top tech assistant to Microsoft's Bill Gates.

A startup company being formed by Alex Gounares, a former top assistant to Bill Gates who until March was chief of technology for Patch parent company AOL, has located in Kirkland and joined the .

"Concurix" is still being put together, but will be based in Kirkland, according to Chamber Executive Director Bruce Wynn and a story posted recently on Xconomy, an online publication focusing in tech business news.

The Concurix website describes it as a “new company focused on building a next generation operating system for cloud data centers.” It has set up shop at 244 Market Street.

Gounares resigned from AOL last February, amid a proxy battle with an activist investor group and after a series of executive departures at the company, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. In the early 2000s, Gounares spent three years as Gates’ top technology assistant at Microsoft.

Wynn wrote in his blog last week that Gounares and Concurix had joined the Kirkland Chamber of Commerce earleir this month, and that the downtown core was a major draw.

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"He loves downtown and wants to have a place to take clients and go to after work," Wynn said.

Another tech firm also recently located in Kirkland on Market Street, OSS Integrators, Wynn noted. It specializes in IT operations and analytics and is at 610 Market Street.

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Gounares told Xconomy that the company was still being put together. “It’s too early to talk about specific numbers or customers or things like that,” he said.

But its apparent focus will be new operating system software better adapted to handle an increasing number of processor cores on microchips—“multi-core chips”—to make computers run faster. Recent operating system designs are not getting the full efficiency out of multi-core chips, he told Xconomy. For its full story, click here.


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