Josh Coates no longer owns American Fork-based Mozy Inc., the company he founded to provide remote data backup over the Internet. But Mozy, which was acquired by EMC Corp. in 2007, continues to provide simple, secure data backup to 500,000 customers and 20,000 corporations.

Each step in Coates' career helped develop skills and ideas that would culminate in Mozy. Coates began while still pursuing his degree in computer science at the University of California at Berkeley. As a student, Coates and two associates broke the world record in data sorting, beating out competitors from Compaq and IBM. His first post-graduation job was at Inktomi, where he developed network caching software.

But the entrepreneurial bent was strong in Coates, and he soon left to found Scale Eight, which developed scalable storage software technology. After selling the company's intellectual property to Intel, Coates directed engineering and operations for the nonprofit Internet Archive in San Francisco.

In 2004, Coates moved his family to Highland, and the following year, he founded Berkeley Data Systems, which would later become Mozy. Coates decided to raise the lowest possible amount of venture capital so that he could maintain control of the business.

In its third year of operations, Mozy began providing backup service to General Electric's entire global employee base. Since its sale, Mozy is run as a wholly owned subsidiary of EMC, and Coates serves as chief technology officer of EMC's Advanced Development Program.