Audio File:& Download MP3Transcript:& An Interview with Shanna Tellerman Product Line Manager, Autodesk Date: October 3, 2011 [intro music] Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO of NCWIT, National Center for Women & Information Technology. We're working hard to encourage more girls and women to pursue computing, education and career paths. This interview series with women who have started great technology companies is very inspirational. and to be having great advice for all entrepreneurs in terms of starting companies. With me Larry Nelson, w3w3. Hi Larry. Larry Nelson: Oh boy! It's a pleasure to be here. This is a great, great series. I know your listeners want to pass this interview along to others and you know would be interested and they can listen to it at couple of different places that we'll give you at the end of the show 24/7. Lucy: Today, we have another great person to interview. The talent just keeps coming. Today, we're talking to Shanna Tellerman who is currently at Autodesk, Cloud Services and Applications, but before that she was Founder and CEO of Wild Pockets. Shanna is in a post- acquisition mode. That's a very exciting thing to have a company that you are the founder of, be acquired. Wild Pockets is an end-to -end open source solution that supports creators through the life cycle of 3D game development. I can't wait to hear more about it. It was Shanna's first technology company out of graduate school, but she attended Carnegie Mellon University, which is just a great, great school. She attended the Entertainment Technology Center. Doesn't that sound like great deal of fun? Shanna welcome. We're really happy to talk to you today. Shanna Tellerman: Thank you, glad to be here. Lucy: Tell us a little bit about Wild Pockets/Autodesk and what's happening. Shanna: My company was Wild Pockets. We were building out a 3D game engine that you could access in a web browser. What we were trying to do is make the ability to build games, 3D games specifically, easier and more broadly accessible to anybody. When my company first met with Autodesk, Autodesk is the creator of 3D tools and all kinds of products for the media world, the entertainment world, architecture, manufacturing, engineering. They saw what we were doing and saw that we had an idea that could be applicable to a lot of their different tools and products here at Autodesk. There was a lot of synergy between our teams and the company. Ultimately they decided that we should join them. Now I work at Autodesk. I'm the Product Line Manager for our new Autodesk cloud product line, something that's coming out this fall. It has been started through the summer last year. It's a really exciting new space for Autodesk. We're doing some awesome new things. Lucy: Well, that's pretty exciting. We don't often talk to people who are in that post-acquisition mode, so maybe a sentence or two about what that was all like. Shanna: This Autodesk acquisition of our company was a pretty quick experience. We had been talking to them and working with them a bit over the course of two years. Then, when I met with one of their directors of engineering, he was really an exciting person to talk to and visionary here at Autodesk. Then I would think up on what we were doing and what he was doing on a fairly regular basis. We did that a couple of times over the course of two years. Finally, they said, "We really want to move forward. We want to make their team part of our company." Once they said that, the process went really quickly. It was really about working together, figuring out the right terms, making sure investors were happy, et cetera, but we all had the end goal in mind. Within a couple of months, the whole deal was closed. Our team in Pittsburgh can move into an Autodesk office in Pittsburgh. I was in San Francisco. I had moved into their San Francis