| Willem van Biljon | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 29, 1961 Pretoria, South Africa |
| Residence | Cape Town, South Africa |
| Alma mater | University of Cape Town |
| Occupation | Founder of Nimbula, Inc. |
Willem van Biljon is an entrepreneur and technologist born, raised and educated in South Africa. Willem graduated from the University of Cape Town with a degree in Computer Science.
Willem was formerly at Amazon.com where, along with Chris Pinkham and Christopher Brown led the team that Chris put together to build Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Willem built the business plan for the service and was responsible for product management and marketing for the highly successful public cloud service.[1][2][3][4] [5]
Prior to Amazon.com, Willem co-founded Mosaic Software.[6] Mosaic built the Postilion payment system, the first high-end payment transaction switch for commodity hardware and operating systems (Windows). Mosaic's investors included GE and Paul Maritz.[7] The company became one of the top three payment processing software vendors in the world and was sold in 2004 to S1 Corp.[8][9]
Prior to Mosaic, Willem held a number of engineering and research positions at LinkData, the Institute for Applied Computer Science and the National Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
In 2006, Willem left Amazon Web Services and has since started a new venture with his long time friend Chris Pinkham. The company, Nimbula,[10] is focused on Cloud Computing software and is funded by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners.[11][12]
Willem has co-authored a couple of patent applications: "Managing Communications Between Computing Nodes",[13] "Managing Execution of Programs by Multiple Computing Systems".[14]