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Carl Erickson started Atomic Object in the summer of 2001 with Bill Bereza, one of his former students at Grand Valley State University. They raised Atomic from the ashes of a dot-com startup where he had been VP of Engineering. When that company failed to get a second round of funding, it went under and left them with some office furniture, three interns, the remainder of a lease, and a missing month's pay. (We still use the office furniture, one of those three intern is now co-CEO, and he long since stopped missing the $10,000 final paycheck.)