Richard Campbell started playing with microcomputers in 1977 at the age of 10. He's really never done anything else since. In that time he's been involved in every level of the PC industry, from manufacturing, to sales, to development, even into large scale infrastructure implementation. He has been a witness and participant to the Bill Gates vision of "A PC on every desktop." For years he's served as a consultant to companies in many countries, including Barnes&Noble.com, Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson Health Care Services, Reuters, Subaru/Isuzu and the U.S. Air Force, providing advice on architecture, scaling systems and mentoring development teams.
His long experience in working with large scale systems made him a sought-after consultant during the halycon years of the DotCom boom. He worked closely with venture capital and private equity firms providing architectural direction and due diligence. Richard has also been part of the founding groups of a number of different businesses including Strangeloop Networks, which in 2006 raised the largest Series A round financing (11.5 million) in Canadian history. In later years he has helped organize software consulting firms in a number of developing countries. His involvement in training developers resulted in training materials and videos sold through Applications Developers Training Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has been the author of over 400 articles in a variety of magazines, including writing the question-and-answer column for Access-SQL-VB Advisor for ten years.
Richard has also been deeply involved in conference planning and speaking, organizing conferences all over the US, Canada and Europe. He has spoken at conferences on every continent except Antarctica. In 2004 he first met Carl Franklin, creator of .NET Rocks, a podcast targeted at .NET developers. Richard was a guest on show 69, but his friendship with Carl quickly evolved into a partnership and by show 100 in early 2005 he came onboard as co-host. The partnership bore fruit in the form of more shows - in 2006, under the parent company PWOP Productions, Richard and Carl launched dnrTV and Hanselminutes. In 2007 demand was so great for shows that .NET Rocks grew to two shows per week and Richard launched another show called RunAs Radio, aimed at the IT Professional using Microsoft technology. By the end of 2011, .NET Rocks published its 700th episode reaching 200,000 listeners in 120 countries twice a week as well as launching a new podcast focused on tablet and mobile development called The Tablet Show.
Today Richard is on the board of directors for Telerik, a leading vendor of development, team productivity, automated testing tools, UI components and content management solutions in the Microsoft space. He is a Microsoft Regional Director and is recognized as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in the area of ASP.NET development. He splits his time between his various business ventures, consulting, producing podcasts as well as speaking at conferences including Tech Ed US, Tech Ed Europe, Tech Ed Asia, DevConnections and numerous regional shows in Canada, US and Europe.