Wes Boyd (born c.1960) is an American software developer and political organizer. In 1987, he and his wife Joan Blades co-founded Berkeley Systems, a San Francisco Bay area software company. After selling the company in 1997, Boyd and Blades went on to found the liberal political group MoveOn.org in 1998.
Early life and education
He was born in 1960. Native to Berkeley, California,
In the early 1990s, Boyd's popular screen saver bundle had brought in several millions of dollars. By the end of the 1990s, he left that business, and became politically active.
By the late 1990s, the company employed 150 people and made around $30 million a year in sales. in 1997. The email involved a simple online submission form.
The site moveon.org appeared September 18, 1998 with the sole purpose of building a petition to express disapproval of Bill Clinton, call for a "quick censure" and move on to other issues. Boyd and Blades styled it as a "flash campaign."
When the signatures were collected, Boyd and Blades printed out 20,000 pages of email and had them hand-delivered to every member of the House of Congress. By 1999, the organization had raised $12 million in pledges to congressional campaigns of people who had not voted in favor of impeachment. It did so through the PAC MoveOn Political Action Committee. In 2002, they supported Paul Wellstone.
By 2008, it had an email list of 4.2 million names and had donated $118 million into political matters, such as "opposing U.S. involvement in the Iraq war, supporting an unregulated Internet and helping hurricane victims find temporary housing, among other activities. The group runs ads on television, on the Internet and in newspapers and magazines."
Personal life
Boyd is married to Joan Blades, also his long-term business partner. They have two children and live in Berkeley.