Will Harvey is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who achieved early fame as an Apple II game programmer at the age of 15. Will is notably the founder of IMVU, an instant messaging company, and of There, Inc., an MMOG company.
The first game Harvey developed was 1982’s Lancaster. The need for music in this game led to his development of 1984’s heralded Music Construction Set, published by Electronic Arts (EA) and ported to the platforms of the era. After high school, Harvey studied computer science at Stanford University, where he earned his Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D. During this period, he started two game development companies and published several additional titles through Electronic Arts.
In 1995, Harvey founded Sandcastle, an Internet technology company that addressed the network latency problems underlying virtual worlds and massively multiplayer games. Sandcastle was acquired by Adobe Systems.
In 1998, Harvey went on to found There, Inc., which produced a virtual 3D world designed for online socializing. In 2003, Harvey founded IMVU, which combined the idea of avatars with instant messaging.
Harvey is a frequent lecturer at Stanford and Berkeley in entrepreneurship.
