About Us

who are you?

We are Max and Amy Newell. We’re married, and we have two kids together. Amy’s mom came home with an Apple II+ when Amy was six. Max grew up playing with his father’s spare 80-column IBM punchcards. Both of us got humanities degrees and later did graduate work in software engineering.

Max started a web consulting business back in 1994. We met in 1997, at the Harvard Bookstore. In 1998 he shut down his own business and joined a friend’s interactive agency full-time as a technical project manager. In 1999, we got married. In 2000, after a spiritual experience with a heapsort in a data structures class Max was taking, Amy quit her job as an academic adminstrator and took CS classes full-time at Harvard Extension School to become a software developer. 9 months later, Amy joined Abuzz.com just in time for the coming-of-age experience of a massive dot-com layoff. Then she went to work at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, where she developed workflow and specimen management software for the molecular pathology department. In 2003 Amy decided to take a break from working to make a couple of kids. Max stayed on as a Technical Director at Circle, through a number of sales, spinoffs, mergers, and other complicated corporate maneuvers, finally leaving the company (by then named Euro RSCG Circle) in 2004. Since then, we’ve been living la vida consulting.