Mansour Safai - in memoriam
Remembering a great entrepreneur
On February 9, 2006 Mansour Safai, the founder and CEO of M7 passed away after a long and courageous battle with his disease.
The software industry lost a technologist and entrepreneur of great vision, excellent technical capabilities and strong determination. He left a great mark in the software development tools industry with products always at the frontier of innovation, such as Multiscope Debugger, Symantec Visual Café, and M7 NitroX.
We also lost a friend, a man of great integrity, an avid, competitive sportsman and a loving father.
Mansour was born in Tehran, Iran December 3, 1962. He studied in Tehran, in Nice and then at the EPFL in Lausanne. He finished his thesis with a project for Logitech in the Modula-2 language and development tools.
In 1987 he joined Logitech in Fremont, California, in the Modula-2 Group, that he ended up managing a few years later. He led a spin-off of this group into a new company called Multiscope. He ran that company at its CEO. Giacomo Marini and Pierluigi Zappacosta served on the Board of Multiscope.
Symantec acquired Multiscope. Mansour and his team became the core of a tools development group that worked on C++ compiler, tools, debuggers, and finally the Visual Café Java Tools. He was Vice President and General Manager of the language and Internet tools division of Symantec Corporation until BEA acquired that division.
He then started M7. M7 produced the award winning NitroX product. BEA acquired M7 in September 2005.
We are proud of having worked with and having funded Mansour.
Mansour, we miss you. We will always remember you.
