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building circuits, writing computer programs and learning more
about electrical engineering, but those outside enthusiasms distracted
him from schoolwork.
Aer high school, he enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technol-
ogy, majoring in electrical engineering. But he found the discipline
too static, with little room for innovation or discovery.
At that point, he switched to bioinformatics.
"One of the leaders of that department was like, 'everything that you
learn in your first two years won't matter because it'll be obsolete by
the time you graduate,'" he said, "and that seemed really cool to me,
that stuff was actually changing."
Leaving RIT, he faced the same problem that had dogged him since
high school — his neglected coursework didn't reflect his true abili-
ties. With a 2.2 GPA and a semester's worth of credits still unfinished,
graduate school was out of reach.
So, he moved back into his parents' basement and decided his best
option was to start a company — one that wouldn't require him to
explain his grades.
"And so, that was how Datto began," he said.
Market clarity
McChord experimented with several ideas before landing on one
that stuck: developing a network-attached storage (NAS) device for
data backup, with the added feature of creating a second copy in the
cloud.
He says it had the virtue of being something he could physically
build with cheap components. At the time, he was working part-time
at a packaging company, handling IT tasks, and saw how small busi-
nesses like that could benefit from such a device.
Continued from previous page
Entrepreneur Austin McChord and his wife, Allison, next to a map outlining their vision for restoring Manresa Island in Norwalk.
The couple plans to transform the former power-plant site into a publicly accessible coastal park.
