A Kirkland, Wash.-based tech company is suing its New York-based acquisition advisor, alleging it was pushed into a $5.2 million acquisition that was supposed to generate $1 million annually but has instead required ongoing cash infusions just to stay afloat.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of SmarTek21, a longtime technology consulting services firm, accuses TGP GP Management of “egregiously defective due diligence” in its May 2025 acquisition of IT Avalon, another U.S.-based tech consulting company.

According to the complaint, Tortuga Growth Partners, a New York-based private equity firm, acquired a minority stake in SmarTek21 in 2024. Its affiliate, TGP GP Management, a management and acquisition advisory firm, entered into an agreement to advise SmarTek21 on acquisitions and related matters.

TGP responded in a statement: “TGP strongly disputes the allegations in this complaint and stands by the comprehensive due diligence process conducted for the IT Avalon acquisition.”

The lawsuit was filed Dec. 18 in King County Superior Court in Seattle by Totem Lake Investments II, the majority owner of SmarTek21. Totem Lake Investments is led by SmarTek21 CEO Alkarim Lalji. The suit seeks at least $6 million in damages, plus punitive damages and other relief.

According to the complaint, TGP almost immediately began pressuring SmarTek21 to acquire IT Avalon, as a complementary business that would augment SmarTek21’s existing model and diversify its customer base. The suit says TGP represented that IT Avalon would generate at least $1 million annually in free cash flow, before other benefits from the combination.

The complaint alleges that TGP’s principal Ashray Prasad dismissed concerns raised by SmarTek21 executives about IT Avalon’s deteriorating finances in the days before closing. According to the suit, Prasad repeatedly called Lalji urging him to close the deal — placing many of these calls while Lalji was undergoing treatment for a serious medical condition.

The lawsuit alleges TGP pursued the IT Avalon acquisition out of “enthusiasm for transaction fees, publicity, and the appearance of quick deal-making.”

According to the suit, IT Avalon’s revenue had been declining since 2022, and its operating income had dropped significantly, while its vendor relationships deteriorated.

TGP structured the deal so that any working capital shortfall would be offset against future earnout payments to IT Avalon’s sellers. But that proved worthless, the suit alleges, because IT Avalon had almost no chance of hitting the revenue targets that would trigger those payments.

In its statement, TGP disputed these claims.

“IT Avalon is a strong technology business with valuable client relationships,” it said. “The combined entity now benefits from an expanded client base, talented personnel, and a robust pipeline of opportunities. We intend to vigorously defend against these baseless claims.”

The dispute illustrates the complicated nature of private equity-led technology roll-up strategies, in which smaller companies are combined to create larger platforms.

The acquisition of IT Avalon in May was the second in six months for SmarTek21, following its earlier combination with Retro Rabbit, a South Africa-based product design firm, according to a press release by Tortuga Growth Partners announcing the IT Avalon deal at the time.

“We are building a category-defining platform,” said TGP’s Prasad, who is also a member of SmarTek21’s board of managers, in the press release. He added that the completion of the second acquisition over that time frame reflected “the momentum behind SmarTek21’s growth.”

According to the company’s public materials, SmarTek21 provides product engineering and enterprise software services to Fortune 250 clients in industries including financial services, healthcare, and telecom. It says it has more than 650 associates across the U.S., India, and South Africa.

IT Avalon, founded in 2012, provides technology consulting services to clients in financial services, healthcare, gaming, and hospitality. The May press release announcing the deal described the company as having a 95% client retention rate.

Lalji and SmarTek21 did not respond to requests for comment. See the full complaint below.

SmarTek21 v. TGP Management by GeekWire

Tracking down a far-flung team for a 40-year reunion isn’t easy. But the people who worked on Windows 1.0 got some help from their younger selves: a mischievous Easter egg they hid long ago in the software that would become the foundation of the world’s dominant PC platform.

Back in the mid-1980s, before the product launched, they secretly inserted credits in the code, listing their names, to be revealed through a specific combination of keystrokes. 

As the story goes, Bill Gates inadvertently found the list by slamming his fists on the keyboard in frustration over the system’s sluggishness, a discovery that only made things worse. The fix: make the sequence more obscure. It worked. The credits went unnoticed by the public until 2022, when a researcher who was reverse-engineering old Windows binaries found them.

When members of the Windows 1.0 team decided to hold a 40th anniversary reunion this year, that roster became their starting point. It was a time capsule that doubled as a guest list.

A core group from that original Windows team reunited over dinner at Steve Ballmer’s offices in Bellevue on Tuesday evening — trading memories, correcting the historical record, and marveling at what they accomplished back then under nearly impossible circumstances.

“Today, developers have all these tools, drag and drop,” said Rao Remala, an early Windows developer, adding that he would challenge anyone today to build a functioning PC operating environment under the 64K segment limits and other technical constraints of the era.

“Have you tried it in ChatGPT?” Ballmer joked from across the room. 

This year has been filled with commemorative milestones for the tech giant, from Microsoft’s 50th to Excel’s 40th to the 30th anniversary of the company’s internet pivot. But this one is different. It’s a glimpse into one of Microsoft’s scrappiest projects, from a moment in its history when key resources — including budget and computing power — were far more scarce.

Microsoft’s landmark platform

Windows 1.0, which shipped on a set of 5.25-inch floppy disks, was technically considered an operating environment, not an operating system, because it ran on MS-DOS 2.0.

Microsoft announced it was developing Windows in November 1983. The release was delayed as the team worked through leadership turnover, technical challenges, and user-interface debates (i.e., tiled vs. overlapping windows), giving rise to industry accusations of peddling “vaporware.” Windows 1.0 finally debuted on Nov. 20, 1985.

By the time it launched, Apple’s Macintosh had set the standard with its elegant interface (at least by 1980s standards). Other DOS-based alternatives were also on the market. Critics favored the Mac’s polish, but Microsoft bet on broad PC compatibility, and that approach ultimately paid off.

Microsoft would later get sidetracked temporarily by its ill-fated OS/2 partnership with IBM, before Windows 3.1 became a breakout hit and Windows 95 set the global standard.

But none of it would have been possible without Windows 1.0. The intense, multi-year project was the foundation for the platform that ultimately turned Microsoft into one of the world’s most valuable companies, launching careers that would reshape the tech industry.

For Ballmer, who was tapped to get Windows 1.0 across the finish line long before he became Microsoft’s CEO, the 40-year reunion stirred up old memories and emotions. 

“Of all the things I worked on at Microsoft, in a way, I have the most pride about this project,” he told the group, explaining that he truly felt part of the team.

Figuring things out on the fly

As the night went on, the stories came out, some of them for the first time.

Working out of Microsoft’s Bellevue offices, before the company moved to Redmond, the team was largely in their 20s and even their teens in some cases. (Ballmer, in his late 20s at the time, was one of the older people in the office.) That helps to explain the culture at the time. 

“Work and social life — there was no difference. It all sort of blended together,” said Scott Ludwig, who worked on the Windows 1.0 window manager, the core system that handled windows, input, events, menus, and dialog boxes.

They were often figuring things out as they went. For example, when Lin Shaw started in August 1984, months before the original ship date, not a single printer driver existed. She built the banding architecture — a way of imaging one strip of a page at a time to work within memory constraints — that would last through Windows 95.

She routinely stayed up all night and considered it the best job in the world. “It was just like college,” she told the group during the reunion dinner, “except I got paid really well.”

Gates got involved — at times down to the smallest details. Mark Taylor, who wrote the calculator and other early Windows apps, recalled Gates asking him to remove a timer delay in the Reversi game — not to make it faster, but to make Windows look faster. Years later, chips got so fast that the move flashed by too quickly to see, turning the fix into a bug.

Joe King, who worked on the Windows Control Panel, had an office across the hall from Ballmer with remarkably thin walls. He watched a parade of people come for their “SteveB meeting.” The pattern was always the same: quiet conversation at first, then Ballmer would start pacing, getting louder, gesturing emphatically, and reaching a crescendo before it was over.

“The door would open, a guy would sheepishly walk out, and Steve would greet the next person with full energy and enthusiasm,” King recalled. “I would see that all day long.”

Tandy Trower reminisced about joining the team in 1985 despite being warned that it was a dead end by another product manager, Rob Glaser, later of RealNetworks fame. 

“I came to Microsoft with this vision of bringing software to the people,” Trower said, explaining that Ballmer pitched the Windows project to him as a way of accomplishing that goal. 

He took the job, only to discover the head development manager was already gone. Ballmer offered reassurances that the product was “virtually done.” It wasn’t. 

When Trower suggested changes — overlapping windows, proportional fonts — he got the same response: “You want to ship this year?” The answer was yes. Trower ended up working on Windows through Windows 95, part of a Microsoft career that ultimately spanned 28 years.

Marlin Eller, a programmer and musician, was interested in building a music notation editor. At the end of his first year, Gates asked what he wanted to work on. Eller pitched his idea. Gates engaged enthusiastically, then asked: “How big is the market?” Eller realized it was very small.

Gates had another idea. For music notation, Eller would need to build a graphics package — lines, ovals, curves, etc. An operating system needed that foundational technology to support spreadsheets and charts. And that’s how Eller ended up working on Windows. 

“The thing the world does not know,” Eller joked before the dinner, “is that Windows was written so I could do music notation. All those other people were working for me.”

Pulling pranks and checking facts

And then there were the pranks. A month or two before Windows 1.0 shipped, for example, developer Mark Cliggett decided to have some fun. He wrote a program that gradually turned off bits on a computer screen, and installed it on Ballmer’s machine when he wasn’t there.

“Multiple bad decisions right there,” Cliggett acknowledged: putting malware on a colleague’s computer, giving it to the future CEO, and missing the irony given the security challenges that would consume the industry years later. Marlin Eller wasted an hour debugging the problem before realizing what had happened. Ballmer, to his credit, didn’t hold a grudge.

GeekWire was invited to cover the Windows 1.0 reunion and document all this history. To prepare, I pulled together a 16-page report using Google’s NotebookLM to mine for information about Windows 1.0 in a variety of historical documents, books, and articles.

After I mentioned this to Ballmer, he suggested I open the evening by reading some colorful anecdotes from the research. It turned into an impromptu fact-checking exercise. 

Did Ballmer really call a meeting at 9 a.m. on Easter Sunday 1985 and take down the names of anyone who didn’t show? Yes, he called the meeting. No, he didn’t take names. “I wouldn’t call it exactly a loyalty test,” Ballmer explained, saying it was more about setting a tone. 

Did the team really blow off steam by making bombs and rockets with sugar and saltpeter, drawing police to the building when a security guard smelled explosives? Actually, that happened when making a later Windows version, according to someone who was there. The security guard joined them to blow up traffic cones in the parking garage. The police came later, when they were hiding in the library. (The details are a little fuzzy, but you get the idea.)

And finally, turning to a canonical story about the Windows 1.0 project: was the pivotal 1983 Comdex demo really just a videotape flashing graphics on the screen — classic smoke and mirrors to freeze the market? No. “This was real code,” Remala insisted. 

“It was a little more smoky than not,” Ballmer added, “but it was all real code.”

Some notable former members of the Windows 1.0 team were missing from the reunion, including the famously hard-to-reach Gabe Newell, who went on to co-found Valve and build Steam into the dominant PC gaming platform.

Rick Dill and Paul Davis, who led development of the Windows Software Development Kit and organized the first Windows developers conference in Seattle in January 1986, were also unable to attend. Dill later managed Microsoft’s joint OS/2 development with IBM and spent years at Amazon; he is now retired in Redmond.

Scott McGregor, the lead development manager recruited from Xerox PARC, left before Windows 1.0 shipped. McGregor later co-authored the X11 windowing system at DEC and served as CEO of Broadcom.

Members of the Windows 1.0 team have gone on to remarkably varied careers.

For example, user interface developer Neil Konzen worked at Ferrari in Italy and pioneered Formula One telemetry. Ed Mills, who worked on fonts, runs a movement therapy practice in Bellevue and is involved in a nonprofit that operates a roller-skating rink in Issaquah.

Cliggett became a long-distance running coach. Eller (who went on to co-author the book Barbarians Led by Bill Gates) teaches computer science. Trower founded a robotics company and continues to work in the field. Taylor is a Seattle public school teacher.

King still introduces himself in the Seattle tech scene by saying he goes back to Windows 1.0 — sometimes prompting the response: “There was a 1.0?” Yes, there sure was.

For Ballmer, the Windows 1.0 experience led to a management technique he still uses today. On his first day as development manager, he repeated to the team what he’d been told was the schedule for different aspects of the project. He heard laughter in response.

He now calls this the “snicker test” — repeat back what you’ve heard from a project’s leaders, and see how the room reacts. If they laugh, you know you’re not getting the true story.

But the real legacy of Windows is much bigger, he told the group this week. If it had shipped two or three years later, Windows wouldn’t have been a relevant product, he said. The key, he explained, was figuring out how to ship “enough of the right stuff at the right time.”

“You did, and it’s nothing short of amazing,” Ballmer said. “It did change the world.”

Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

Jay Graber, CEO of the Bluesky social network, moved to Seattle during the pandemic, attracted to the region in part by the trademark gray skies, ironically. She doesn’t feel bad about staying inside and reading, writing or working on drizzly winter days.

But she also loves the outdoors. Her proudest Pacific Northwest moment: finding a matsutake mushroom under a fir tree, a species so prized that locations are treated like trade secrets.

Graber, in other words, is someone who values extraordinary things and the environments that allow them to thrive. This comes through in the tech ecosystem she oversees.

Most social networks today are walled gardens, where one company runs the servers, owns the data, and sets the rules. The AT Protocol (which Graber pronounces “at”) is an open technical standard for social media that Bluesky’s team built as the foundation for its network. Bluesky is just one app on top of it, and in theory you could move your posts and followers to another app or server with different moderation or algorithms without losing your social graph.

“The hope is that whatever happens with Bluesky — however big it makes itself — the protocol is something we hope to endure a really long time,” Graber said in a recent interview, “because it becomes foundational to not just Bluesky but a lot of apps and a lot of use cases.”

However big it makes itself. The phrase stands out in a world of tech startup leaders intent on scaling their creations toward billion-dollar exits through force of will. 

Graber instead sees Bluesky as “a collective organism,” brought to life by users, grounded in the decentralized protocol like soil on the forest floor. “I did not anticipate what Bluesky became when I started this, and so that very much makes it feel like it’s something that’s growing, that I’m overseeing, but also has a life of its own,” she said. 

Katelyn Donnelly, founder and managing partner of Avalanche, an early investor in Bluesky, first met Graber in 2022 at a small gathering of technologists, investors, and academics. What struck her: Graber was the only one in the room focused on building, not just talking. While others discussed big ideas, Graber was working through the details of how to make them real.

Later, after Bluesky’s launch, Donnelly attended a meetup in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Graber stayed for hours, meeting with early users, gathering feedback, and listening. 

Donnelly calls Graber “incredibly low-ego for being so young and successful.” At the same time, she isn’t afraid to be provocative, like when she wore a shirt that read, “Mundus sine caesaribus” (“a world without Caesars”) at SXSW in 2025 — styled exactly like Mark Zuckerberg’s “Aut Zuck aut nihil” (“Zuck or nothing”) shirt from a Meta event.

“You can just tell immediately that she’s never going to give up. If Bluesky failed, she’d probably build something similar again.” That’s the definition of “life’s work,” Donnelly said: everything Graber has done to date has led her to this point. 

Finding her own way

Graber was born in Tulsa, Okla., to a math teacher father and a mother who had emigrated from China. Graber’s given first name, Lantian, means “blue sky” in Mandarin. It’s a pure coincidence, given that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey would later choose the name Bluesky as a project inside the social network long before Graber was involved. 

Her mom chose the name to symbolize freedom and boundless possibility, reflecting opportunities that she didn’t have growing up in China. 

Those themes emerged early for Graber. Around age five, she resisted her mother’s structured attempts to teach her to read, running around the backyard instead. Her dad took a different approach: he brought her to the library and asked what interested her. She discovered Robin Hood, and read every version the library had, from children’s books to arcane Old English editions. The story captivated her: renegades pushing back against centralized authority.

As she continued to read, she was drawn to stories of scientific discovery, and eventually to writers who imagined new ways society could work, such as Ursula K. Le Guin.

Later, as a student at the University of Pennsylvania, Graber studied Science, Technology, and Society, an interdisciplinary major that let her explore technology from a humanistic perspective while taking computer science classes. 

After graduating in 2013, she worked as a digital rights activist, moved to San Francisco, enrolled in coding bootcamp, and worked at a blockchain startup. Later she found her way to a cryptocurrency mining operation in a former ammunition factory in rural Washington state — what she calls her “cocoon period” — where she spent long hours studying code in isolation. 

She went on to work at a privacy-focused cryptocurrency company, founded an event planning startup called Happening, and kept searching for the right environment for her own ambitions.

Origins of Bluesky

Then, in December 2019, Dorsey announced that Twitter would fund a project to develop an open, decentralized protocol for social media. He called it Bluesky. 

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵

— jack (@jack) December 11, 2019

Graber saw the thread and felt the pull. 

As detailed in an April 2025 New Yorker story, Dorsey’s team had set up a group chat to explore the idea. Graber joined and noticed the conversation was scattered — people would pop in, make suggestions, and disappear. No broader vision was coalescing. 

Graber started doing the work: gathering research, writing an overview of existing decentralized protocols, trying to provide some signal amid the noise.

By early 2021, Dorsey and then-Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal were interviewing candidates to lead the project. Graber stood out in part because she didn’t just tell them what they wanted to hear. She accepted, on one condition: Bluesky would be legally independent from Twitter.

It was a prescient demand. That November, Dorsey resigned as Twitter’s CEO. The following spring, Elon Musk began buying up shares. By October 2022, he owned the company, and promptly cut ties with Bluesky, canceling a $13 million service agreement.

Graber was on her own. But that was the point. 

“You can’t build a decentralized protocol that lots of parties are going to adopt if it’s very much owned and within one of the existing players,” she told Forbes in 2023.

‘High agency, low ego’

Today, Bluesky has more than 40 million users and a team of around 30 employees. The company has no official headquarters — fitting for a decentralized social network — though Graber and several employees work out of a co-working space in Seattle.

The platform is still far smaller than X, which reports more than 500 million monthly active users, and Meta’s Threads, which has around 300 million. Mastodon, another decentralized alternative, has about 10 million registered users. But Bluesky has grown steadily, and its open protocol gives it a different ambition — not just a destination, but the infrastructure on which others build.

Graber runs the company with what she calls a “high agency, low ego” philosophy.

“Everyone on the team exercises a lot of agency in how they do their job, and what they think the right direction is,” she said. “They try to pick up stuff that needs to be done whether or not it’s in their job description — that’s the low ego part.” 

Overall, she said, this has made for a very effective small team, although she acknowledges the trade-off: “Sometimes people have strong opinions and wander off in their own directions.” So getting people back in alignment, she said, is a big part of her job.

She describes her leadership style as collaborative rather than top-down. “I try to cultivate people’s strengths on the team and bring together a synthesis of that,” she said.

Dorsey, who sat on Bluesky’s board in the early years, is no longer involved. Ultimately, he and Graber saw things differently: Dorsey wanted Bluesky to be more purist about decentralization. Graber wanted to “catch the moment” and bring people into something accessible, even if it was somewhat centralized at the start.

Embed from Getty Images

“When we disagreed, he ended up just going his own way, as opposed to trying to force me to do a thing,” she said. Based on her experience, Graber said, Dorsey would hold his position and disagree, but not use his power to mandate a specific direction. 

Mike Masnick, the TechDirt founder and writer whose essay “Protocols, Not Platforms” helped inspire the project, now holds Dorsey’s board seat.

Graber describes herself as a “pragmatic idealist.” Pure idealists, she said, pursue visions that can’t work in the real world. Pure pragmatists never produce meaningful change. The key is holding both: a vision of how things could be, and the practical steps to get there.

The implications of AI

Graber sees the same dynamics playing out with artificial intelligence. The question, she said, isn’t whether AI is good or bad — it’s who controls it.

“If AI ends up controlled by only one company whose goal is power or profit maximization, I think we can anticipate that will lead to bad outcomes for a lot of people,” she said. On the other hand, if AI tools are widely available and open source, “you have this broader experimentation” — with all the chaos that entails, but also the potential for solutions that serve users rather than platforms.

She imagines a future where people might bring their own AI agents to a social network, the way Bluesky already lets users choose their own algorithms and moderation services.

“Maybe you can even run this at home in your closet,” she said. “Then you have your own AI agent that protects your own privacy, doing things for you — that’s a human empowering technology that’s working in your interest, not in the interest of a company that does not have your welfare at heart.”

She thinks a lot about historical trajectories. The printing press, she noted, ushered in a period of chaos — new technology disrupting society — followed by the construction of new institutions that made use of widespread literacy, such as universities, academic journals, and peer review.

“We’re in another period of chaos around new technologies,” she said. “We have to build new institutions that make use of everyone having access to the internet.”

The AT Protocol, in her view, could be something like that. Bluesky the company might rise or fall, narrow into a niche, or lose relevance with a new generation. But if the protocol takes hold, it becomes the foundation for something larger than any single app or company.

“If the protocol becomes widely adopted, that’s a huge success,” she said. “If people rethink how social works, and Bluesky becomes the origin point for social media to change, that’s a success.”

However big it makes itself.

Amazon is experimenting again. This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we dig into our scoop on Amazon Now, the company’s new ultrafast delivery service. Plus, we recap the GeekWire team’s ride in a Zoox robotaxi on the Las Vegas Strip during Amazon Web Services re:Invent.

In our featured interview from the expo hall, AWS Senior Vice President Colleen Aubrey discusses Amazon’s push into applied AI, why the company sees AI agents as “teammates,” and how her team is rethinking product development in the age of agentic coding.

RELATED STORIES

• Stars on the ceiling, Cher on the speakers: Our first ride in Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi
• We tested ‘Amazon Now’ in Seattle — and got our delivery in 23 minutes
• The AWS CEO thought Amazon needed a million developers, until AI changed his mind

With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook. Edited by Curt Milton.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.