IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - June 2019 - 16

the world could market themselves.
This idea of democratizing code, of
finding a way to monetize its creation,
is what led Howell and James Bodajlo
to cofound BlockWave.
But make no mistake; BlockWave is
not just an app store for code snippets.
It is what Howell, Bodajlo, and their
team envisioned when they set out to
design the "perfect tool for anyone to
solve problems with software." BlockWave shows us the future of programming, where programmers will help
make software development so modular
and abstract that anyone will be able to
quickly and easily create complex solutions on a low-code or no-code platform.
"LEGO has proven that an ecosystem
can form when a wide array of highly engineered blocks, following simple rules,
meets the imagination and creativity of
kids and adults with a problem to solve
and gives them the power to solve it at
their fingertips," Howell says. "LEGO's
recent Creator program has taken it one
step further by closing the loop, feeding
back solutions, monetizing and rewarding their creators, and driving the development of yet more blocks. We believe
software needs a similar ecosystem, one
which values and fairly rewards all programmers who invest their time to devel-

op highly engineered blocks, while making it simple to put them in the hands of
creative people with problems to solve."

Miracle Men
It's an ambitious project, but Howell and
Bodajlo have long been known as "the
guys who can get it done." Howell, a selfdescribed serial entrepreneur, has been
knocking around with computers since
he was a teenager in the United Kingdom. He happened to be coming of age
in the mid-1990s, when every company,
large and small, was champing at the bit
to get an e-commerce site up and running on a nascent Internet. Howell got
his start in tech by buying a few computer textbooks and building websites. First,
it was the small businesses. Then, it was
larger corporations. "Looking back, it
was like selling shovels to gold diggers,"
he recalls, and by 2000, he and Bodajlo,
still in their late teens and early 20s, respectively, found themselves consulting
for a large firm in New York City.
There, they designed and deployed
collaborative engagement solutions for
large events. Think huge hotel ballrooms
filled with hundreds of attendees, the
"leaders of the world" from one domain
or another, be it business and government, among others. Howell and Boda-

jlo would often have 24 h to set up 300
seats, each with a hard-wired, "old-world
analog" desktop running a virtual chat
room. The idea was to use technology to
break down cultural and communication
barriers at in-person meetings. They were
routinely asked to pull off miracles. Not
only did they become known as "the guys
who could get it done," but this is when
they traveled the world, as Howell puts it,
"working alongside local teams, experiencing every language, every nationality."
Mobile came along, and, although
there was demand for moving their
business to a mobile platform, their
current employer wasn't interested. Howell and Bodajlo left and started 4th Down
Solutions. "We set out to build an app in
2010, but it grew rapidly, and before long
we had a mobile white label platform,
which is now used by large enterprises for
internal engagement and facilitation of dialogue," Howell says.
One factor that led to their success?
They brought a diverse group of people to
the table. Howell explains, "You're always
going to make mistakes. We've learned
the hard way, over the years, that the way
to make fewer is to have a bunch of different perspectives and experiences."
Under this philosophy, 4th Down Solutions built a tight team of 30 full-time

The 4th Down Solutions team, shown here, is "a wonderfully mixed group, brought together by our love of solving big
problems, and kept together by the success our diversity of thought and skills makes possible," says Howell.

IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

JUNE 2019

IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - June 2019

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