Name: Hayden Hamilton
Title: Founder Organization: GreenPrint LLC
Age: 30
Industry: IT
30-second biography: An entrepreneur at an early age, Hamilton had a gaggle of businesses as a kid — a gutter cleaning service, a snack shop and a Web design service. Once at college, Hamilton opened a co-op bookstore that challenged the campus monopoly. After graduation, he joined Ford of Europe to help create an innovation department, but he soon decided that the corporate life wasn’t a good fit, quit and moved to San Francisco to explore entrepreneurial opportunities. A few months later, Hamilton launched ProgressiveRx.com to provide a low-cost option for those without health care benefits. He then founded Progressive Health Worldwide to provide free pediatric tuberculosis clinics for kids in rural India. In 2005, Hamilton created GreenPrint to combat his frustration over the wasted paper that accumulates when Web articles are printed.
Current project: “GreenPrint Home and Enterprise software analyze every page of every document sent to a printer looking for typical waste characteristics (like that last page with just a URL, banner ad, logo or legal jargon) and then eliminates those pages. GreenPrint also incorporates an easy-to-use PDF writer, an innovative print preview, and a reporting feature that keeps track of the number of pages, trees, CO2 and money saved. We estimate that the average large organization will save more than $2 million and 4,000 trees a year using GreenPrint.”
Who in the technology industry most influenced your career? “Jim Clark and Bill Gates have demonstrated the amazing potential that exists for entrepreneurs in technology who either have business acumen (Gates) or innovative ideas (Clark) but very little else to get started.”
Technology you can’t live without: “Skype with SkypeIn calling, for daily contact with our development teams in London and India and a Portland number that can be forwarded to a local cell phone or office anywhere in the world.”
Most-critical technologies for IT this year: “The new wireless technologies, if correctly implemented, have the biggest potential impact. WiMax, at least conceptually, has the potential to revolutionize the IT industry in the West, but maybe more importantly, in the developing world. It will create incredible new economic opportunities and business models. A version of Bluetooth that really works is another potential market-changer.”
The best thing about today’s technology: “It creates a playing field that’s more level than ever before. The ability to connect to anyone globally at virtually no cost, ubiquitous availability of enormous information, and the relatively inexpensive, powerful, mobile hardware (today’s laptops) make it possible for a shepherd in Eritrea to sell his goods in Italy. It has allowed a small start-up like GreenPrint to have teams in Portland, San Francisco, Romania, India and London.”
The worst thing about today’s technology: “The technology industry still suffers from development that is led by engineering rather than by customers. We need to work harder to identify the unmet customer needs and design products in such a way that they are truly intuitive and easy to use.”
Technology can … “Eliminate poverty, spread freedom and democracy, and greatly improve everyone’s quality of life.”
Book that was most recently on your nightstand: An audio version of The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright
Favorite Web sites: www.lonelyplanet.com, www.metacritic.com, www.nytimes.com, www.howstuffworks.com, www.npr.org
What sets you apart? “My goal is to launch at least one new product every year that targets an unmet consumer need and is socially beneficial as well as profitable. Some will be successful and some won’t be, but hopefully all of them will be interesting and provocative in terms of generating new ideas and new products.”