INSTALL PIONEER
DAN’S THE MAN As Dan Feldstein takes up the mantle of President and CEO at Crestron Electronics, the company that his father (George Feldstein) founded, he takes on our in-depth Q&A in the latest of our Install Pioneer series. Tell us about your early years at Crestron, what was your experience like? From my childhood, through adolescence, and into my first years working post-college, Crestron has always been part of my story. I joined Crestron full-time in 1994. At the time, Windows applications were just starting to proliferate and there were no college classes that focused on them so it was completely new to me. We had one person teaching himself how to write Windows applications. I began to work with him, and we learned together. Once I became proficient, my first major Windows application was SIMPL Windows, which is still used today. Writing that application gave me a unique understanding of the inner workings of the SIMPL programming language. That led me
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to be part of the firmware team that wrote the logic engine for the 2-series control processors which is the basis for control processors to this day.
Did it help or hinder being the founder’s son? I’ve been the son of Crestron’s founder for my entire life, not just my entire working life, and thus I’ve received decades of first-hand exposure to technology engineering that I consider instrumental in getting me to where I am today. From when I was a young kid, I dreamed of working at Crestron because, like my dad, I love to invent, which led me to become an engineer. That passion is the most important benefit I received from being his son.
How much have things changed since you started? Our core identity as an engineering company is one thing that I can tell you has not changed, as Crestron is still very much technology driven. We’re big picture thinkers. We want to understand why a customer wants to see a feature added to a particular device, or what pain points are driving a request for new software functionality. By thinking holistically about the experiences our customers are after and the end results they’re trying to achieve, we can engineer whole solutions to whole problems, rather than constantly patching up piecemeal components.
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