In Good Hands — Why the Engineers Who Built InDesign Still Do the Work Themselves

Depth Over Headcount: How a twenty-person company holds senior engineering talent and wins enterprise-scale work

Max Dunn has automated Adobe publishing technology since the mid-1990s and grew Silicon Publishing from two people to over twenty. Some of those twenty are the original engineers who created InDesign, which is why a shop that size takes on cloud automation work usually handed to far larger vendors. He argues that bench depth beats headcount, because the people who wrote the software know what it will and will not do before anyone writes a line of code. Listeners leave knowing how to judge a small vendor's bench, and what to ask a big one to find out whether it has anyone like that at all.

About Max Dunn

Max Dunn, podcast guest

Entrepreneur, Technologist & 26-Year Veteran of the Creative Technology Revolution

Since 2000 Co-founded and leads Silicon PublishingBertelsmann Former Director of Software DevelopmentAdobe First client on day one, in 2000InDesign User Group speaker on automation and AI

Max Dunn is the founder and CEO of Silicon Publishing, a technology company that has spent 26 years transforming the way businesses create, automate and deliver millions of personalized documents and graphics at scale.

A lifelong technologist and entirely self-taught entrepreneur, Max has built his career at the intersection of business, technology, creativity and constant reinvention. He has lived through some of the biggest technological shifts of the past four decades, from database publishing and the early web to desktop publishing, web-to-print, cloud technologies and today’s AI revolution.

Max’s story began inside a small database-publishing division of the Bertelsmann empire, where he worked on some of the world’s largest data-driven publishing operations. As the World Wide Web emerged, he recognized its potential early and helped create some of the earliest large-scale dynamic web publishing applications.

In 2000, Max and his co-founder left that world behind and built Silicon Publishing from scratch-with no funding, no marketing department and, as Max puts it, very little traditional business experience. Their first day brought both a $15,000 project and a relationship with Adobe that would ultimately span more than two decades.

That relationship became pivotal.

View profile →

Book Max Dunn for your show

Request an interview →