Larry Augustin, chairman of VA Software, founded the company in 1993 as a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at Stanford University. A strong advocate of collaborative software development, Augustin was the visionary behind SourceForge.net, the largest Open Source development site on the Internet. With 460,000 users worldwide, SourceForge.net is also the largest reference implementation of VA Software's commercial SourceForge product.

Before founding VA, Augustin was a research associate in the program analysis and verification group (PAVG) at Stanford University where he worked on rapid prototyping languages, software engineering, hardware verification and software prototyping environments. Prior to Stanford, he worked as a systems engineer on high-speed switched digital services at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Larry Augustin holds a Ph.D. and an M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame.