MERE’16 warmly welcomes Jon Hirschtick as our keynote speaker for this year! Jon obtained his SB and SM degrees in Mechanical Engineering from MIT (1983, 1986). He was the manager of MIT CADLab before founding Premise, Inc., where he built his first CAD design system called DesignView. He has served as Director of Engineering at Computervision. In 2003, he founded the SolidWorks Corporation, and served as its CEO until 2011. Since then, Solidworks has become the most popular 3D design software in the world. In 1997, Solidworks was acquired by Dassault Systemes where Jon served as a group executive at Dassault Systemes till 2011. Today the annual revenue of SolidWorks reaches around $500M, with over 1 million users worldwide.
In 2012 Jon founded a new company called Onshape – the first and only full cloud 3D CAD system. According to their website: “Onshape is the only company in the world 100% focused on cloud and mobile CAD, offering the first professional 3D CAD system that lets everyone on a design team work together using any web browser, phone, or tablet. Onshape was built from scratch for the way today’s engineers, designers and manufacturers really work, giving them secure and simultaneous access to a single master version of their CAD data without the hassles of software licenses or copying files.”
Beyond these, Jon has served on the Engineering Advisory Board at Boston University, as Board Member of Liquid Mechanics and Vela Systems, and as advisor for Magic Leap, Inc. as well as MarkForged. He was a player, instructor and trainer on the MIT Blackjack team during 1984 to 1994, and a professional magician. His hobbies include golf, 3D printing, tennis, yoga, and magic.