United StatesMike Payne
Educated in physics at the University of Southampton, with an MSc from King's College London and an MBA from Pace University, Payne served as director of CAD/CAM research and development at Prime Computer before co-founding PTC with Samuel Geisberg in 1985. He joined PTC in March 1986 and became vice president of development a month later, leading the team that built Pro/ENGINEER, the groundbreaking parametric modeling system. After PTC, he co-founded SolidWorks in 1994 as Executive VP of R&D, later serving as CTO at Dassault Systèmes, then led SpaceClaim as CEO. Known for hiring mechanical engineers over programmers—handing them C manuals with the instruction to "learn it tonight"—he believed engineers smart enough to grasp software fundamentals outperformed the reverse.
