Pat Copeland

recent 2016-2017

"Transform construction industry"

area	Research & Development
title	Vice President
responsibility	strategy, engineering, product, design
team size	100
manager	Tracy Young, CEO & Founder

Vint Cert with me at PlanGrid, 2017

Construction Graph
As PlanGrid's R&D leader, I focused on personalizing the customer experience to better predict construction workers’ needs at every touchpoint. PlanGrid's R&D team became a strategic resource for customers to facilitate innovation, increasing their ability to make smarter, more predictive decisions from anywhere on the job site, in real time. We provided customers with immediate insights into blueprints, specs, photos, RFIs, field reports, punch lists, project status, and additional cost-saving opportunities on a global level. Customers became more agile and could make better decisions when they had all project information at their fingertips.

Key accomplishments include: We increased the capability of R&D delivering the foundation of PlanGrid’s future construction graph, grew the team from 50 to 100+. The department created, designed, and shipped numerous innovative products and features that helped unlock productivity at scale for an industry that has been historically overlooked by Silicon Valley.

Press Highlights
ENR: Data Mining in Construction
Construction Exec: How Construction Avoids Innovator’s Dilemma

previous 2013-2016

"Abundant access for all"

area	Products and Infrastructure
title	Senior Engineering Director
responsibility	strategy, engineering, product, design
team size	300
manager	Craig Barratt, CEO Barefoot Networks

Routers by Google, 2015-6

Revolutionize Access Points
With an incredible team, created the strategy, product, engineering, and retail expansion of OnHub and Google WiFi growing the team from zero to a team of 150 people across numerous disciplines. Google WiFi won numerous design awards and high praise from top tier press outlets. Our team designed the hardware, mobile apps, cloud systems, and algorithms from scratch. The final product motivated consumers, influencers, and stakeholders to respond to Google’s simplicity, quality, and capability that resulted in a complete revolution of the router industry. [more]

Democratizing Rich Content
In 2016, YouTube Accelerator was a widely deployed, strategic service that allowed users in areas with poor networks to watch popular videos with less buffering and load times. Accelerator locations stored over 100,000 of the most viewed YouTube videos on their local WiFi network, ensuring they start quickly and play with less buffering. Our team designed the hardware, cloud systems, and satellite service to reach areas with poor backhaul networks. I grew the business to a scale where it was being deployed throughout emerging markets such as the Philippines and India. In 2017, Google discontinued support for Accelerator opting to roll out faster WiFi in public spaces as part of the Google Station program. [more]

Press Highlights
Wall Street Journal: The Wi-Fi Router Gets a Brain
David Pogue: Router Steve Jobs Might Have Built
Related: WiFi infrastructure for 10M in India

bygone 2011-2013

"Ads, big data, customer love"

area	Advertising
title	Senior Engineering Director
responsibility	strategy, engineering, product, design
team size	500
manager	Susan Wojcicki, CEO YouTube

Fast Big Data
We built systems like Dremel and visualization systems to handle the avalanche of big data and transform it into actionable information. Initially, the team was challenged with heterogeneous storage systems and formats, verticalized and enmeshed data and code, and many querying and visualization frameworks. The team unified analytical processing by integrating ad hoc query, pipelines, and self-service dashboards, backed by Google’s massively scaled data storage.

The team invested in and scaled the superheroic JavaScript framework that took over web development and is used by numerous Fortune 1000 companies. HTML is great for declaring static documents, but it falters when engineers try to use it for declaring dynamic views in web-applications. AngularJS allowed engineers to extend HTML vocabulary for their application. [more]

Selling and Insight Platforms
Our team built a platform for Google’s primary business: advertising. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is critical in tracking millions of advertisers that account for the majority of Google’s revenue. There were opportunities to make sales and marketing teams far more effective and efficient. The platform was broadly adopted and quickly became the system-of-record for the entire global company.

Danish Technology Magazine Interview, 2011

Google Feedback
Our team created the innovative system behind every single Google product that collects and clusters billions of automated stack traces and error reports. Using AI, clustering algorithms, and large compute resources, the team processed and aggregated the data into exemplar issues that allowed Google product groups to respond to emerging problems very quickly with data and confidence. [more]

Press Highlights
Wired: Google’s Dremel Makes Big Data Look Small
ACM Articles on Dremel

ancient 2006-2011

"Systems that fuel Google"

area	Systems Infrastructure
title	Senior Engineering Director
responsibility	strategy, engineering, company transformation
team size	1000
manager	Bill Coughran, Partner Sequoia

Engineering Productivity & Systems
Our strategy was to radically change how Google built software, and in the process we helped the entire industry delivery massive cloud based systems by building the fastest and most scalable automated development environment in the world: 150M builds/day, 20 check-ins/min, 170M LOC, 1 source tree. In 2006 our tools were considered the highest priority issue facing engineering and by 2012 these tools were voted "the MOST valuable resources to engineering." We moved company from 30 days release cycles to hourly. I lead the strategy and innovation behind the company wide technical and cultural effort to radically improve product velocity and quality. [more] [more]

We created and open sourced a HUGE suite of tools used to improve web development. Many of the largest companies in the world use our tools, and became the core technology in browsers, APIs and frameworks. The short list: Angular, Selenium, Webdriver, Paco, Axsjax

Selling $1B idea to SFO audience 2010

Pretotyping
Invented by Alberto Savoia, a manifesto that influenced Google products and many fortune 100 companies to improve their approach to products. A philosophy, movement, and practical guide for improving project success and reducing slow painful failures. [more]

Accessibility + i18n
We built automated systems that globalized and internationalized all of Google's products to 160 markets. Nearly instant localization of 1M strings per month. Built a number of tools that used professional and crowdsourcing to scale. We added text-to-speech to Android that became a huge feature and is now used for many interactions and 'borrowed' by competitors.

Press Highlights
How Google Tests Software, by Whittaker
Pretotyping, by Savioa
Testing on the Toilet
Lead W3 Name Convensions
Created Google Virtual Keyboard
YouTube Automatic Captions

jurassic 1995-2006

"Software used by everyone"

area	Search, Data, Business, OS
title	Engineer -> Sr Engineering Director
responsibility	engineering and other functions
team size	500

In Redmond with Bill Gates and the team, circa 2004

We started Microsoft's homegrown search with a handful of pioneering folks. Introduced "information boxes" and infinite scroll that are now common.

2004-2006	Search Engine
manager	Ken Moss, CTO EA

We started Microsoft's enterprise software business and expanded it globally.

2002-2004	CRM, ERP, Business Systems
managers	Hal Howard, CEO Komiko Satya Nadella, CEO Microsoft

We built initial versions of XML and web services and integrated them into Windows.

1999-2002	Databases and Webservices
manager	Adam Bosworth, VP AWS

We built Microsoft's first mobile RT operating system and first embedded hardware products: Set-Top Boxes, PocketPC, Tablets, Phones.

1995-1999	Operating Systems
managers	Bryan Trussel, CEO Glympse Frank Fite, CTO Sesame Craig Mundie, PCAST

ramblings

Accolades and Awards

2018-20	Amazon Best Selling Mesh Router: Google Wifi
2017	SF Business Times: PlanGrid Best Mobile App
2016	Apple: Best of App Store (PlanGrid enterprise app)
2016	Red Dot: Product of the Year (OnHub)
2016	Prestigious IDSA Gold Award (OnHub)
2016	International iF Award (OnHub)
2016	Good Design, Australia (OnHub)
2016	Spark 2016: Gold (OnHub)
2015	Design 100: Gold - Best Connected Device (OnHub)
2015	International Design Awards: Gold (OnHub)
2013	IEEE Company of the Year: Google Crisis System
2010	National Assn of the Deaf: Award of the Year (Google)

Speaking and Writing

2019	Amazon Global Selling Conference, Shanghai
2017	Construction Exec: Avoid Innovator's Dilema'
2013	Crisis and Election Innovation at Google
2013	Wavelength: Pretotyping
2011	Computer Magazine Cover Story
2010	QCon San Francisco Keynote

Crisis and Alert Systems
We envisioned and created a world wide alerting system that literally saved people's lives by integrating massive crowd-based and government emergency data with Android and Google.com. This product and strategy made Google's Crisis Response information accessible around natural disasters and humanitarian crises, and won IEEE Company of the Year award in 2013. Great story: How we saved lives!

Flu Trends v2
We improved on an algorithm that estimated how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world. We found that there's a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics on Google.com and the CDC data on hospital visits for flu symptoms. We evangelized it throughout the word with papers and speaking at scientific conferences like London's ISNTD.

Elections and Politics
Our society is becoming increasingly apathetic about politics and the people representing our interests. We created a data platform and interface on Google.com that communicated real time voting records and election results to help citizens become more aware of their government. We made this data that is traditionally hard to find, easier to discover on Google.com and partnered with many countries around the world to make it available to billions (e.g. USA, Germany, Kenya, and many others). During elections this is the highest traffic service at Google. [more]

beginnings

I started loving software on a field trip to the Stanford Computer Lab in 3rd grade. I played with a chemistry simulator for hours and the teacher had to drag me away.

My grandfather gave me a copy of Basic for my birthday and I taught myself by playing with sample code. A few years later I learned C, and I wrote my first "real" programs. My mom was an artist in the Bay Area and was always encouraging me to find ways to blend creativity, art, and programming together. One of these ideas was a text-to-speech random sentence generator. I'd made two versions, one clean and one had (6th grade level) dirty words. Doing a demo in front of the computer lab (nerd alert) I ran the wrong one, and had my first major software presentation failure at show-and-tell.

I was leaning toward medicine in college but always programmed for fun and even sold a few games for date and beer money. About half way through undergrad at the University of Arizona, I took a computer science elective that made me excited about software again - maybe even as a "career". I jumped into writing compilers and operating systems. A difficult discussion with my dad (who was a heart surgeon) followed where I told him that I wasn't interested in being a doctor. He supported me, but was concerned, "how are you going to make a living in software?"

In grad school at the University of Southern California I studied artificial intelligence, machine learning, and emerging "web software". My first real job (other than delivering pizza in high school) was at a little place called Microsoft in Redmond where they were paying me to do exactly what I wanted to do. I stayed there for over 11 years and became a Senior Engineering Director. When the paradigm shifts toward the web and cloud was underway, I moved to Google and have been there since 2006.

DNA: Paternal R-U152, Maternal H3.

interests

I enjoy working on things that customers love, value, and use everyday. My passion is developing great ideas with smart people, and delivering thought-leading, massive scale products that improve people's lives. I've lead small innovation incubation, large scale systems projects, and company wide initiatives. I've worked on hardware, operating systems, infrastructure, data systems, algorithms, tools, and consumer facing products. I've managed multidiscipline teams ranging in size from tiny to huge and across distributed locations. I've been very lucky to have worked with some of the best folks in the industry.

Drawing: "A watched pot", 2016

Artwork
Lately I'm interested in digital drawings (using: iPad Pro, stylus, ProCreate). I've done acrylic painting for many years, but on a tight schedule, it's harder to get all set up.

Moon, 11/12/2013, 7:21pm in Arizona

Astrophotography
Amature star-gazer and aspiring astrophotographer, experimenting with a Celestron EdgeHD 14" Aplanatic Schmidt-Cassegrain, 3910mm, with f/11. [more]