John Imlay Jr., IM 59, of Atlanta, on March 25. Imlay was a founding father of Atlanta’s tech industry and an angel investor whose backing helped start many successful businesses. Imlay’s business career took off in 1971, when he became CEO of Management Science America Inc., known as MSA. According to the Atlanta Business Chronicle, Imlay was recruited at age 33 to help lead the ailing corporation out of debt in 1971. Imlay did away with the company’s dozens of business lines and decided instead to focus on its software business. MSA emerged from bankruptcy and grew to be a software powerhouse. With Imlay as CEO, MSA grew from $2 million in revenue in 1970 to $280 million when the company was sold to The Dun & Bradstreet Corp. for nearly $400 million in 1990. Imlay was also a generous supporter of innovative new businesses. According to the Business Chronicle, he set aside about $4 million from the MSA sale to invest in startups. Over the next two decades, Imlay backed more than 120 technology companies with a focus on software businesses. Imlay was the second investor in Internet Security Systems Inc., a business started by Tech student Chris Klaus and alumnus Tom Noonan. The company went public in 1998 and was sold to IBM Corp. in 2006 for $1.6 billion.Imlay is also credited with persuading Georgia Tech leaders to partner with the private sector at a time when the school was primarily focused on military business, according to The Atlanta Journal Constitution. In addition to his business acumen, Imlay was also a minority owner of the Atlanta Falcons and a published author. His industrial management book, “Jungle Rules: How to Be a Tiger in Business” was published in the U.S. and abroad. In 1994, Imlay was inducted into the Technology Hall of Fame for Georgia and received the Entrepreneur of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997.
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