Max Dunn grew up in Berkeley, California, attended
Wesleyan University (earning a BA in Music in 1985), and worked as a database programmer in Silicon Valley in the 1990s. He directed Software Engineering at Bertelsmann Industry Services (BIS) at the peak of the dot com era. This division of Bertelsmann had a rich history, and was at the time feeding billions of pages per year to Bertelsmann’s 300 print subsidiaries around the globe.
Max fell in love with document and image automation, focusing on the emerging XML standard (BIS heavily used SGML, from which XML and HTML were born) and related standards such as XSLT, XSL-FO, and SVG. BIS pioneered online document creation from the first days of the web and is the first company to produce dynamic PDF from an online input.
In 2000, he co-founded Silicon Publishing (SPI) with his BIS colleague Alissa Whitney. They set out to do precisely what they had done previously, and Adobe became their first client on day one. SPI worked with Adobe on the FrameMaker product, helping release XML support and FrameMaker Server, then led implementation of
DITA within FrameMaker for years. But their passion was not FrameMaker. Adobe’s brand-new product, InDesign, was clearly far more powerful.
Max and Alissa have led SPI to this day, as CEO and CTO respectively. From early on, they made Adobe InDesign their composition engine of choice, begging Adobe for an InDesign Server. Max had been asking for server-based versions of their products since the mid-90s, to which the Adobe response was initially, “what’s a server?” (They eventually came around).
Max tech-edited
SVG Unleashed in 2002 and contributed a chapter to
Charles Goldfarb’s XML Handbook in 2003 (“WYSIWYG XML editing and formatting”). He authored whitepapers for Adobe, as well as articles in technical publications on XML, InDesign Server, and DITA. He also has spoken at numerous conferences and guested on various technology and business podcasts.
After 5 years of automating InDesign desktop as far as it could go (parallel to FrameMaker development), Max was overjoyed to see Adobe finally release
InDesign Server in 2005. This led to substantial growth for SPI.
When Adobe offshored InDesign development in 2009, SPI hired numerous members of the original InDesign team, dramatically improving the quality and scalability of SPI’s software. In 2011,
Olav Martin Kvern (who implemented Scripting, IDML, and InDesign Server at Adobe) joined SPI, raising the company’s engineering to yet another level.
Since that time, SPI has led the largest document automation projects on the planet for numerous leading brands. The past decade has been all about product improvement: Max is a strong believer in staying very current with technology, and SPI’s code is constantly updated to reflect new concepts in test-driven development, continuous integration, and prudent adoption of new technologies such as XR, AI, and headless, API-first publishing.
Currently, Max is excited by the renaissance of Adobe graphic and document software. After years of focus elsewhere, Adobe encountered disruption from Canva, Figma and others. This, along with the advent of viable AI models, has inspired an exciting set of new Adobe offerings, such as
Express and
Adobe Firefly Services, both of which beautifully parallel SPI’s devotion to online editing and server-side rendition, finally crystalizing Adobe’s commitment to his original vision. SPI is currently even more deeply allied with Adobe, and Max does not see this changing any time soon.
