Max Dunn
San Francisco, California
Max Dunn grew up in Berkeley, California, earned a BA in Music from Wesleyan University in 1985, and spent the 1990s as a database programmer in Silicon Valley before directing Software Engineering at Bertelsmann Industry Services (BIS) at the peak of the dot-com era. BIS was then feeding billions of pages a year to Bertelsmann's 300 print subsidiaries worldwide, and it was there that Max fell in love with document and image automation. He immersed himself in the emerging XML standard and its relatives (XSLT, XSL-FO, SVG), while BIS pioneered online document creation and became the first company to produce dynamic PDF from web input.
In 2000, Max co-founded Silicon Publishing with BIS colleague Alissa Whitney; Adobe became their first client on day one. SPI helped Adobe bring XML support and server capabilities to FrameMaker and led DITA implementation for years, but the founders' real passion was Adobe's new InDesign, which they pushed to its limits on the desktop while lobbying Adobe for a server version. When InDesign Server finally shipped in 2005, SPI grew substantially. The company later hired numerous members of the original InDesign team, and in 2011 Olav Martin Kvern, who had led InDesign automation at Adobe, joined SPI. Along the way, Max tech-edited SVG Unleashed, contributed a chapter to Charles Goldfarb's XML Handbook, authored whitepapers for Adobe, published articles on XML, InDesign Server, and DITA, and has spoken at numerous conferences and on technology and business podcasts.
Max and Alissa continue to lead SPI as CEO and CTO, and the company has delivered some of the largest document automation projects in the world for leading brands. Max is a strong believer in staying current: SPI's code is continually updated to reflect test-driven development, continuous integration, and prudent adoption of technologies such as XR, AI, and headless, API-first publishing. Today he is energized by the renaissance in Adobe's graphic and document software. Offerings like Adobe Express and Firefly Services closely parallel SPI's long-held devotion to online editing and server-side rendering, crystallizing the vision Max has pursued since the beginning, and SPI is more deeply allied with Adobe than ever.
