John Demme received his PhD in Computer Architecture from Columbia University in 2014 under the mentorship of Prof. Simha Sethumadhavan. He then stuck around as a research scientist for a bit, traveled around for a little while, worked as a freelancer, and eventually wound up at Microsoft around Nov 1, 2016. His interest in hardware design tools began in 2013 during an internship at Microsoft (working on the original Catapult project), where he was first exposed to the triple-threat horrors of SystemVerilog, Modelsim, and Quartus. He has been working passionately on better tooling for FPGAs since then.