Bernardo de Castilho is a civil engineer, software developer, and veteran of growing software businesses who we are proud to announce is joining Weavy as an advisor. In the early 90s, Bernardo created the FlexGrid control, which became one of the best-known and well-loved grid components on the market.
Prior to becoming an independent developer, Bernardo was the CTO of GrapeCity Inc., a software development company and Weavy partner. We were able to sit down with Bernardo and ask him a few questions about his background, his time with GrapeCity, his interest in Weavy, and his goals as our new advisor.
Being able to add collaboration features such as chat, document collaboration, and activity feeds to my apps makes them a lot more interesting and valuable to users. Being able to do that without spending a lot of time and effort in the process is fantastic.
Weavy: Can you describe your background, specifically your involvement with Component One and subsequently GrapeCity?
Bernardo Castilho: I am a Civil Engineer. In the early 1990s, while I was working on my Ph. D. at UC Berkeley, a friend and I started a software company called VideoSoft. We made VBX and OCX components, including the first versions of the FlexGrid control.
VideoSoft was pretty successful, and in the early 2000s it merged with another vendor called APEX to form ComponentOne. By that time, .NET was introduced and ComponentOne created components for WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, and ASP.NET.
10 years passed and ComponentOne was acquired by GrapeCity, a Japanese company that we always had a good relationship with. I became GrapeCity’s CTO, and interacted a lot with our developers and customers for a long time.
In the early 2020s, I stepped down as GrapeCity’s CTO and left the company to pursue new interests.
What would you say is your area of expertise or greatest strength?
I am a curious person, always looking for new ways to leverage the latest technology and make life easier for myself and others. I am a developer at heart, always ready to learn more about new platforms and tools, and for ways to leverage that knowledge and apply it to the products I am working on.
What do you think is the most important lesson you learned from building and selling products?
The most important lesson I learned is that in order to be successful in this industry, you have to not only listen to customers, but learn to put yourself in their position and identify ways in which you can add value to products in order to make customers’ lives easier and more fun.
I remember a meeting where we wanted to create a new slogan for our company, and we decided on “We create products you will love to use.” That still seems like a really good summary of what’s important in this field.
What do you like most about working with the developer community?
The developer community is large, vibrant, and dynamic, always evolving and changing to accommodate new technologies. Working with this community allowed me to learn a lot about the problems they face and the solutions they come up with. When you can step in and contribute with solutions and knowledge, that is extremely gratifying.
What intrigued you about Weavy and our startup journey?
What intrigued me most about Weavy is how it can bring collaboration to any application, and how easy it makes for developers to add those features to virtually any application.
Being able to add collaboration features such as chat, document collaboration, and activity feeds to my apps makes them a lot more interesting and valuable to users. Being able to do that without spending a lot of time and effort in the process is fantastic.
In what ways do you think Weavy and GrapeCity complement each other?
GrapeCity has a broad and mature suite of components used in all kinds of applications. Many of these applications could benefit from the collaboration features Weavy provides.
For example, being able to chat with customers and co-workers within the applications would make them more powerful, integrated, and ultimately more useful. This would also reduce the need for external tools (e-mail, WhatsApp, et cetera) and integrations.
How do you plan to facilitate mutual projects between Weavy and GrapeCity? What can each of our users expect in the future?
I plan to contribute in two ways:
How do you envision your role as an Advisor to Weavy?
I see myself as a customer advocate within the Weavy team. I would like to help the Weavy development team enhance the product in ways that make it better and easier to use for customers and end-users.
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