In the mid to late 1990s, while getting his dot come merit badge, he co-founded Velocity.com, which was a healthcare software startup. One day while drawing a detailed rendition of the architecture on a white board, it occurred to him that lurking in the may configuration files scattered throughout the architecture was a model. This eventually became a semantic model, and not of an application but applications themselves. This led to rebuilding the architecture around this model, which was patented as the first fully model-driven architecture.
Velocity’s dot come bubble burst, along with so many others, in the spring of 2000. As the architecture and the patents were caught in the burning wreckage of velocity.com, Dave and some of his co-conspirators postulated that what they had learned in uncovering and applying semantics might form the basis for a professional services consulting practice.
