Gary Griffiths and the Art of Changing His Mind

Gary Griffiths had a small, personal reason to regret shutting down Trapit’s free reading app: he used it to keep up with bacon. Among the streams of information that its co-founder and CEO followed was a “bacon trap.” Alongside the business subjects came breakfast. A computer could learn a person’s interests, and sometimes a person’s interests were deliciously uncomplicated.

Closing the service meant losing his own daily digest as well as disappointing other readers. He went ahead. The free app had helped the team test its technology and understand potential customers; the company now needed to concentrate on paying businesses. The product he enjoyed had become a distraction from the business he was trying to build.

That is a useful place to meet Griffiths. His career has plenty of job titles, acquisitions and recognizable company names. Yet this decision catches something a résumé tends to miss: a founder can believe in a product, use it himself, and still decide its time is up. Affection is a poor substitute for a business model. Even when bacon is involved.

02Before the feed, a submarine

Long before he was thinking about what people read online, Griffiths studied aerospace engineering at the United States Naval Academy. He graduated in 1972, went on to postgraduate work at the Naval Engineering school, and served as an officer aboard a nuclear fast attack submarine. His professional beginnings belonged to an institution with rather different expectations from a consumer internet startup.

He later earned a graduate business degree at George Washington University while teaching at the Naval Academy. Engineering, operations and business were already overlapping. In 1979, he joined IBM, beginning a technology career that included work on the PS/2 personal computer and the original ThinkPad brand. From 1993 to 1995, he worked on PowerPC business development.

Those are specific products and specific responsibilities, rather than the vague claim that someone has “seen it all.” They also place him inside several changes in how computing reached its users. A desktop machine, a portable computer and an internet service ask different things of the customer. Knowing the machinery does not automatically tell you how to sell the experience.

Asked years later about people who had influenced him, Griffiths singled out former IBM president and vice chairman Jack Kuehler. What stayed with him was Kuehler’s attention to interests beyond immediate corporate profit. Griffiths admired the willingness to think about the technology industry’s longer future. It was a revealing choice of mentor: someone remembered for the scale of his responsibility, rather than the sparkle of a slogan.

03Games, desktops, meetings

By January 1996, Griffiths was CEO of SegaSoft. He held the role until March 1999. Online entertainment was a considerable change of scenery from IBM, but the work still involved getting technology out to users: building a network infrastructure that could deliver multiplayer entertainment over the internet, with software sold both online and at retail.

In June 1999, he became chairman, president and CEO of Everdream. He remained until December 2005. The company worked in subscription computing, offering another way for businesses to obtain and manage technology. A career that looks like a procession of unrelated companies begins to look more coherent when you follow the delivery problem running through it.

Then came WebEx. Griffiths joined in December 2005 as vice president of products and became president of products and operations. Cisco acquired WebEx in May 2007; Griffiths became a Cisco vice president and stayed until April 2008. His responsibilities were on the product and operating side of a service that brought meetings onto the web.

There is an unglamorous discipline in those roles. Products have to work, operations have to hold together, and somebody has to understand what a customer is buying. The eventual company announcement is only one moment. Griffiths’s employment history contains the years on either side, when the thing being announced still needed to be built, maintained and sold.

04An algorithm with room for surprise

At Trapit, Griffiths joined forces with Henry “Hank” Nothhaft Jr., who had developed the idea while serving as an entrepreneur in residence at SRI International. The company drew on artificial intelligence research from the CALO project, whose technology also contributed to Siri. That shared research ancestry was an easy introduction. Explaining what a discovery engine should do took more work.

A search begins with a reasonably clear request. Discovery leaves room for something you did not know to ask for. Trapit organized material around subjects and adjusted what it delivered as people responded. A topic could remain the same while the person’s particular interests became clearer. The appeal was a reading experience with some memory of its reader.

In January 2012, Trapit announced a $6.2 million Series A led by Horizons Ventures. By 2013, the business question had a concrete answer: a Publisher Suite available to publishers and brands on a monthly subscription. In an August interview, Nothhaft described plans starting at $1,000 a month and explained that the company was developing its business products.

Griffiths liked explaining discovery through ordinary experience. In one essay, he compared an efficient trip to Scottsdale with the wandering journey described in Blue Highways. In another, a colleague’s recommendation of a better cracker for Stilton prompted a discussion of relevance. He could take a technology explanation through a travel book or a cheese plate. Either was more inviting than a diagram with fourteen arrows.

“You are not the crowd.”

Gary Griffiths · Trapit’s founding premise

05A merger still needs people

In December 2014, Trapit and Addvocate announced their merger and the first closing of a $10 million Series B. Griffiths became CEO of the combined business. Trapit supplied discovery and curation; Addvocate helped employees share content through their own social accounts. The combination addressed more of the distance between finding an interesting article and getting it in front of someone.

The announcement described a library drawn from more than 100,000 sources, including professional journals, blogs and video channels. Human editors vetted those sources. Behind the promise of intelligent discovery sat the decidedly human work of deciding what belonged in the library. It was a useful reminder that an automated service can contain a great deal of editorial judgment.

Griffiths’s own account spent time on the people inside the merger. Addvocate operated in San Francisco. Trapit was decentralized, with its largest office in Portland. Familiar routines, company identities and working habits would have to change. “Mergers require give and take,” he wrote. It is a short sentence that covers a long list of meetings.

He treated customer service, sales conduct and the delivery of a useful product as the tests of the combined company. A signed agreement could bring the businesses together on paper. Making the people work together was another assignment. His description gave the integration work a place beside the funding news, where it belonged.

06The dashboard meets the artist

Griffiths left Trapit’s CEO role in February 2015 and moved to iPass, where he had served on the board since 2009. The Wi-Fi business was changing its approach, with plans to reposition around software as a service, new pricing and new customers. Patricia Hume joined as chief commercial officer. She would become a recurring colleague in the next part of his career.

At a 2016 industry event, he discussed a service called Veri-Fi, which used analytics to understand Wi-Fi performance. The examples were practical: identifying potential network partners and spotting access points that delivered a poor experience. By May 2018, iPass was announcing a multimillion-dollar SmartConnect software license while reporting an $11.4 million revenue quarter and a $4 million net loss. Transformation had costs as well as milestones.

Yet the executive working on that software transition also worried about what companies measured. In a published 2016 dialogue with Hume, he questioned whether marketing automation had crowded out creativity. He was interested in the emotional force of an idea, and in why enterprise marketing so often seemed willing to be dull.

“But I can probably also buy a marketing glossary app,” he joked when an acronym defeated them both. The joke suited the argument. A business could acquire another tool, another measurement and another dashboard while leaving the message untouched. Griffiths wanted room for the imaginative work that made someone pay attention in the first place.

07A new company for an old drawing tool

After iPass was acquired by Pareteum in February 2019, Griffiths co-founded Wisdom LLP. By July, Wisdom was leading financing for Canvas GFX, and he was joining its board. Hume was the company’s CEO. That August, the two appeared together on the Service Academy Business Mastermind podcast to discuss the investment and how they would work on the opportunity.

The investment work extended beyond illustration software. In November 2020, Wisdom led a $1 million seed financing for OriGen AI. Its founder, Ruben Rodriguez Torrado, described working with Griffiths and Hume through the Creative Destruction Lab accelerator and benefiting from their experience and network. The operating experience was becoming part of what the firm offered alongside capital.

The drawing software returned to the foreground in late 2025. Vector GFX acquired the Canvas X Draw product line from Canvas GFX. Griffiths financed the acquisition and became chairman of the new company, which announced its launch in January 2026. Its priorities included performance improvements and a more modern user experience. The founding team included Matt Griffiths and Rebecca “Becky” Darsch.

Here was another decision about a product’s future, more than a decade after the free Trapit reader closed. Vector GFX’s stated plan is to keep developing tools for technical illustrators and support people who rely on them. For a career full of transitions, it is a fitting current assignment: decide what deserves to continue, put resources behind it, and make the next version worth using.