Jeremy Jaech and two other Aldus executives established Axon Corporation in Seattle in 1990 to create business graphics software for personal computers. At the time, little had been developed in the way of drawing tools with business applications. To fill the need, Jaech and his colleagues founded Visio Corporation and created the design product Visio.

Some 800 people worked for Visio by the time Microsoft bought the company in 2000. It was Microsoft’s largest acquisition to date and, as Microsoft Visio, it became an important part of Microsoft’s business productivity division. Jaech headed the new division for six months before moving on to other ventures.

Here, in his Visio shirt, Visio president Jeremy Jaech stands in front of a screen with the original Visio Corporation logo. Visio allows the user to manipulate shapes to create flow charts, floor plans, thought processes and other kinds of information visualization.

Caption information source: “Visio Corp Timeline,” Visio, www.visiocorp.info/#/timeline.Retrieved October 11, 2024.
Caption information source: Oral history interview with Jeremy Jaech by Jessah Foulk, Museum of History & Industry, July 23, 2002. https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/imlsmohai/id/8434/rec/5. Retrieved October 11, 2024.