Author Archive: Joshua Krammes

I’m amazed by the people who work at the startups that work with Catalyst. If you could somehow bottle the enthusiasm, creativity and passion that entrepreneurs and startup teams have on a daily basis, you’d have an energy drink worth billions of dollars. It’s impossible to describe in a blog, but because I’m surrounded by people with those characteristics, I’d be doing the blog audience a disservice if I didn’t try to express what I’ve experienced first-hand. Instead of trying to generalize, a better approach would be to give you an example of what I’m talking about, and for that, I just need to turn the spotlight on wind2share.

I first met the wind2share team at TechCrunch SF in the fall of 2012, and I was immediately taken aback by their energy and the genuine kindness they exuded as people. At the time, the team had been slowly making the transition of having employees work in three different cities on two different continents, but it was clear that they shared a unified willingness to work hard and create a meaningful solution for their clients. As my boy Iggy Pop said, they had a “lust for life” that is as magnetic as it is uncommon. And if that weren’t enough, their vision for wind2share is innovative and intriguing:

wind2share is a social business network specially designed for people to make referrals to leading institutions and companies and receive cash rewards based on successful referrals. Businesses seeking to enter new markets can lean on hundreds of ambassadors worldwide to offer their services to new audiences, and expand their client base in new markets.

Since I met them, they’ve made incremental improvements in their user experience, incorporating Facebook and Google+ accounts to streamline signups and launching a new site design to clearly and succinctly convey the business model and the platform’s features.

After a successful pilot run in 2012 which generated more than $1.7 million in revenue, wind2share is strategically ramping up their marketing efforts to continue the viral growth of their disruptive referral model. Given how easy they make the process of connecting and interacting with businesses and top-level professionals around thew world, it’s not a surprise that the startup has been so successful, and I have no doubt that their success will continue.

The beauty of the network wind2share created is the diversity of its functionality. Your social network trusts you, and your referrals are valuable, so wind2share provides a medium for businesses to reward you when you recommend them. Beyond that use-case, if you’re an entrepreneur or you have an idea, you can connect with investors who share your interest and may be of some help. The way I think of it is that it’s a social community with a business purpose. Members are provided with all the information, tools and resources they need to “Make a Wealth of Referrals.”

Companies like wind2share are a glowing successes in our Catalyst. Our team has solved numerous infrastructure challenges for them, and we’ve had the opportunity to make strategic introductions to investors, business leads and potential business partners as the company has grown and matured. Seeing the work pay off in such a positive way with wind2share is proof positive of the value Catalyst provides startups.

To learn more about wind2share or to sign up, head over to wind2share.com. If you’d like to meet the fantastic team of brilliant folks behind the platform, reach out to me directly and I’ll happily start the conversation for you.

-@JoshuaKrammes

SoftLayer listens to customers. There’s no marketing spin or fluff on that statement … I’m a former client, so I can attest to that from a customer perspective and from an internal perspective. When I joined the company as part of the community development team to work with startups in Catalyst, I knew my role was going to be more relationship-based than project-oriented, and that was one of the most exciting aspects of the job for me.

In my last blog about mentorship and meaningfulness, you heard from George Karidis and Paul Ford about the vision to make Catalyst a part of the startup ecosystem, committing to helping participating teams with more than just their hosting needs. While we attended SXSW Interactive, I ran into a few of our phenomenal customers and had the opportunity to sit down with them and talk about their businesses, their connection to SoftLayer and what the future holds:

Over the next few weeks, we’ll add video interviews to that YouTube playlist to show off all of the startups that stopped by the Catalyst Startup Lounge at SXSW 2013. When a new video is published, it’ll be added to the embedded playlist above, and we’ll send some social media shout-outs via Twitter and Facebook.

With SoftLayer’s 7th birthday coming up on May 5, we still feel like a startup, and a lot of that has to do with how closely we work with our customers … Their energy is contagious, and it only encourages us to keep innovating and building our platform for the future. That’s why entrepreneurs like the ones you meet in these videos choose SoftLayer. The fact that we have better technology and provide a more powerful cloud infrastructure winds up being a fringe benefit.

A big “Thanks!” goes out to the folks from Epic Playground, Flowmio, Medved, Urbane, YouNoodle, KeenIO, Cloudability and Preferred Return for taking time out of their busy SXSW schedules to chat with me. We love you guys!

-@JoshuaKrammes

In the Community Development group, our mission is simple: Create the industry’s most substantially helpful startup program that assists participants in a MEANINGFUL way. Meaningfulness is a subjective goal, but when it comes to fueling new businesses, numbers and statistics can’t tell the whole story. Sure, we could run Catalyst like some of the other startup programs in the infrastructure world and gauge our success off of the number of partners using the hosting credits we provide, but if we only focused on hosting credits, we’d be leaving a significant opportunity on the table.

SoftLayer is able to offer the entrepreneurial community so much more than cloud computing instances and powerful servers. As a startup ourselves not so long ago, our team knows all about the difficulties of being an entrepreneur, and now that we’re able to give back to the startup community, we want to share battle stories and lessons learned. Mentorship is one of the most valuable commodities for entrepreneurs and business founders, and SoftLayer’s mentors are in a unique position to provide feedback about everything from infrastructure planning to hiring your first employees to engaging with your board of advisors to negotiating better terms on a round of funding.

The Catalyst team engages in these kinds discussions with our clients every day, and we’ve had some pretty remarkable success. When we better understand a client’s business, we can provide better feedback and insight into the infrastructure that will help that business succeed. In other words, we build meaningful relationships with our Catalyst clients, and as a result, those clients are able to more efficiently leverage the hosting credits we provide them.

The distinction between Catalyst and other startup programs in the hosting industry has never been so apparent than after South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin this year. I had the opportunity to meet with entrepreneurs, investors, and industry experts who have been thirsting for a program like Catalyst for years, and when they hear about what we’re doing, they know they’ve found their oasis. I had a chance to sit down with Paul Ford in the Catalyst Startup Lounge at SXSW to talk about the program and some of the insights and feedback we’d gotten at the show:

Paul was quick to point out that being a leader in the startup community has more impact when you provide the best technology and pair that with a team that can deliver for startups what they need: meaningful support.

Later, I had an impromptu coffee with one of the world’s largest, most prestigious Silicon Valley-based venture capital firms — probably THE most respected venture capital firm in the world, actually. As we chatted about the firm’s seed-funding practices, the investment partner told me, “There is no better insurance policy for an infrastructure company than what SoftLayer is doing to ensure success for its startup clients.” And I thought that was a pretty telling insight.

That simple sentence drove home the point that success in a program like Catalyst is not guaranteed by a particular technology, no matter how innovative or industry-leading that technology may be. Success comes from creating value BEYOND that technology, and when I sat down with George Karidis, he shared a few insights how the Catalyst vision came to be along with how the program has evolved to what it is today:

Catalyst is special. The relationships we build with entrepreneurs are meaningful. We’ve made commitments to have the talented brainpower within our own walls to be accessible to the community already. After SXSW, I knew I didn’t have to compare what we were doing from what other programs are doing because that would be like comparing apples and some other fruit that doesn’t do nearly as much for you as apples do.

I was told once on the campaign trail for President Clinton in ’96 that so long as you have a rock-solid strategy, you cannot be beaten if you continue to execute on that strategy. Execute, Execute, Execute. If you waiver and react to the competition, you’re dead in the water. With that in mind, we’re going to keep executing on our strategy of being available to our Catalyst clients and actively helping them solve their problems. The only question that remains is this:

How can we help you?

-@JoshuaKrammes

The very first client I recruited to Catalyst when I joined the CommDev team about a year ago happens to be one of Catalyst’s most interesting customer success stories … and I’m not just saying that because it was the first partner I signed on. Kickback Tickets — an online ticketing platform that utilized crowdfunding — has simplified the process of creating and funding amazing events, and as a result, they’ve made life a lot easier for the startup, developer and networking organizations that fuel Catalsyt.

Anyone who’s organized events knows that it often involves a financial risk because it’s hard to know whether the event will be well-enough attended to cover the costs of putting on the event. With Kickback Tickets, an event is listed an funded ahead of time, and when it reaches its “Tipping Point” goal of tickets ordered, it’s completely funded, the early supporters are charged, and the ticket sales continue.

The process is simple:

Event updates, guest registrations and QR-coded tickets are provided to attendees to make check-in seamless, so the hosts of each event don’t have hassle with those details. Kickback’s revenue comes from a small fee on each ticket for each successfully funded event, and they’ve got a ton of momentum. After signing on with Catalyst in March 2012, Kickback went live with an open beta in November 2012, and they launched their out-of-beta site in February 2013. They’ve successfully funded more than 20 events, and new events are added daily.

When I met the Kickback founders Jonathan Perkins and Julian Balderas, I was attending SF Beta (my first official event as a SLayer). At the time, Jonathan and Julian were a couple of bankers with an innovative idea to help organizations alleviate the financial risk of planning and putting on events by enlisting community support. I told them about my experience as the COO of a small non-profit startup up called Slavery Footprint (also a Catalyst partner), and I guess they could relate to the challenges SoftLayer helped us overcome because they were excited to join.

In their own words, Jonathan and Julian explain that their partnership with Softlayer and the Catalyst program has been extremely valuable:

SoftLayer provides a rock-solid technical foundation and allows us to focus more resources on business development. On the technical side, what Softlayer offers is impressive — super fast speeds and an intricate level of control over the hardware. On the personal side, the mentorship and networking benefits of the program have been very helpful. We’ve always found the Catalyst team to be available to chat about any questions we had, ranging from development to biz dev to fundraising.

As they continue to expand their platform, it’s going to be exciting to watch Kickback become a true force in the events space. Organize your next event with Kickback and make sure it’s a success.

Oh, and if you want to speak to Jonathan and Julian, just reach out to me and I’ll happily make the introduction.

-@JoshuaKrammes

Every startup dreams about entering an unowned, wide-open market … and subsequently dominating it. About a year ago, I met a couple of Aussies — Vincent and Niall — who saw a gaping hole in the world of personal finance and seized the opportunity to meet the unspoken needs of a huge demographic: People who want to be in control of their money but hate the complexity of planning and budgeting. They built Planwise — a forward-looking financial decision-making tool that shows you your future financial goals in the context of each other and your daily financial commitments.

If you look at the way people engage with their finances on a daily basis, you might think that we don’t really care about our money. Unless we’re about to run out of it, we want to do something with it, or it constrains us from doing something we want to do, we don’t spend much time managing our finances. Most of the online tools that dominate the finance space are enterprise-centric solutions that require sign-ups and API calls to categorize your historical spend. Those tools confirm that you spend too much each month on coffee and beer (in case you didn’t already know), but Planwise takes a different approach — one that focuses on the future.

Planwise is a tool that answers potentially complex financial questions quickly and clearly. “If I make one additional principal payment on my mortgage every year, what will my outstanding balance be in five years?” “How would would my long-term savings be affected if I moved to a nicer (and more expensive) apartment?” “How much money should I set aside every month if I want to travel to Europe next summer?” You shouldn’t have to dig up your old accounting textbooks or call a CPA to get a grasp on your financial future:

One of the most significant differentiators for Planwise is that you can use the tool without signing up and without any identifiable information. You just launch Planwise, add relevant numbers, and immediately see the financial impact of scenarios like paying off debt, losing your job, or changing your expenses significantly. If you find Planwise useful and you want to keep your information in the system (so you don’t have to enter it again), you can create an account to save your data by just providing your email address.

Planwise has been a SoftLayer customer since around August of last year, and I’ve gotten to work with them quite a bit via the Catalyst program. They built a remarkable hybrid infrastructure on SoftLayer’s platform where they leverage dedicated hardware, cloud instances and cutting-edge DB deployments to scale their environment up and down as their usage demands. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t give them a shout-out for evangelizing Catalyst to bring some other outstanding startups onboard. You’ve met one of those referred companies already (Bright Funds), and you’ll probably hear about a few more soon.

Go make some plans with Planwise.

-@JoshuaKrammes

Research from the Aberdeen Group shows the average website is losing 9% of its business because
 the speed of the site frustrates visitors into leaving. 9% of your traffic might be leaving your site because they feel like it’s too slow. That thought is staggering, and any site owner would be foolish not to fix the problem. SPEEDILICIOUS — one of our new Catalyst partners — has an innovative solution that optimizes website performance and helps businesses deliver content to their end users faster.

I recently had the chance to chat with SPEEDILICIOUS founders Seymour Segnit and Chip Krauskopf, and Seymour rephrased that “9%” statistic in a pretty alarming way: “Losing 9% of your business is the equivalent of simply allowing your website to go offline, down, dark, dead, 404 for over a MONTH each year!” There is ample data to back this up from high-profile sites like Amazon, Microsoft and Walmart.com, but intuitively, you know it already … A slow site (even a slightly slow site) is annoying.

The challenge many website owners have when it comes to their loading speeds is that problems might not be noticeable from their own workstations. Thanks to caching and the Internet connections most of us have, when we visit our own sites, we don’t have any trouble accessing our content quickly. Unfortunately, many of our customers don’t share that experience when they visit our sites on mobile, hotel, airports and (worst of all) conference connections. The most common approach to speeding up load times is to throw bigger servers or a CDN (content delivery network) at the problem, but while those improvements make a difference, they only address part of the problem … Even with the most powerful servers in SoftLayer’s fleet, your page can load at a crawl if your code can’t be rendered quickly by a browser.

That makes life as a website developer difficult. The process of optimizing code and tweaking settings to speed up load times can be time-consuming and frustrating. Or as Chip explained to me, “Speeding up your site is essential, it shouldn’t be be slow and complicated. We fix that problem.” Take a look:

The idea that your site performance can be sped up significantly overnight seems a little crazy, but if it works (which it clearly does), wouldn’t it be crazier not to try it? SPEEDILICIOUS offers a $1 trial for you to see the results on your own site, and they regularly host a free webinar called “How to Grow Your Business 5-15% Overnight” which covers the critical techniques for speeding up any website.

As technology continues to improve and behavioral patterns of purchasing migrate away from the mall and onto our computers and smart phones, SPEEDILICIOUS has a tremendous opportunity to capture a ripe market. So they’re clearly a great fit for Catalyst. If you’re interested in learning more or would like to speak to Seymour, Chip or anyone on their team, please let me know and I’ll make the direct introduction any time.

-@JoshuaKrammes

Did you ever see The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio? You know … The one with a community of world-shunners that live in a paradisaical community on a beautiful white-sand beach. The people in that community were purists — altruistic types who believed in the possibilities of living a simple life based on community support of the individual and the individual’s reciprocal support and dedication to the community. Recently, I walked into Hattery — a co-working space in SF — and found a similarly tight-knit community that immediately reminded me of that movie. Hattery is “off the radar” to a certain extent, and that’s largely because the collaborative environment and culture are what drive the incredible group of entrepreneurs who work there. To be allowed in the co-working space, it seems like the prerequisites are endless passion and an ambitious vision, so I shouldn’t be surprised that Bright Funds calls it home.

Bright Funds is a business that was created to provide users the ability to easily invest in complete solutions for the causes they care about. After signing on as a Catalyst partner, Bright Fund co-founders Ty Walrod and Rutul Davé invited me to lunch at the Hattery office, and I immediately accepted so I could learn more about what they are up to. Having been involved in the tech startup world for a while now, I knew that I’d be meeting two very special entrepreneurs with big hearts and even BIGGER tech startup street cred.

Rutul and Ty were not content with their user experience (UX) when it came to giving to charities and helping solve some of the world’s biggest problems. They noticed that little effort had been invested in providing donors with tools to make the act of giving both enjoyable and highly effective, so they took action. Bright Funds was created to redefine and refocus the experience of “giving to charity” … Giving shouldn’t just involve going through the motions of transferring funds from our bank accounts. They built a new giving platform to be more intuitive, rewarding and enlightening, and they did an unbelievable job.

Think of the last time you had a great user experience: An interaction that was as enjoyable as it was effective. Aesthetics play a big role, and when those aesthetics make doing what you want to do easier and more satisfying, you’ve got an awesome UX. The best user experiences involve empowering users to make informed and intelligent choices by providing them what they need and getting out of the way. Often, UX is used for site design or application metrics, but Bright Funds took the concept and used it to create an elegant and simple business model:

Bright Funds was designed to create a giving experience with an intuitive flow in mind. Instead of just writing checks or handing over cash to a charity, the experience of giving through Bright Funds is interactive and didactic. You manage your giving like you would a mutual fund portfolio — you decide what percentage of your giving should go to which types of vetted and validated causes, and you get regular performance updates from charity. I want to help save the environment. I want to give clean water to all. I want to empower the underserved. I want to educate the world. You choose which causes you want to prioritize, and Bright Funds channels your giving to the most effective organizations serving the greatest needs in the world today.

Instead of focusing on individual nonprofits, you support causes and issues that matter most to you. In that sense, Bright Funds is a very unique approach to charitable giving, and it’s a powerful force in making a difference. Visit Bright Funds for more information, and get started by building your own ‘Impact Portfolio.’ If you’re curious about what mine looks like, check it out:

What does yours look like?

-@JoshuaKrammes

People often ask me why I enjoy working at SoftLayer, and that’s a tough question to answer fully. I ALWAYS say that great people and great products (in that order) are some of the biggest reasons, and I explain how refreshing it is to work for a company that operates prioritizes “solving problems” over “selling.” I share the SoftLayer “Innovate or Die” motto and talk about how radically the world of hosting is changing, and I get to brag about meeting some of the world’s most interesting up-and-coming entrepreneurs and how I have the unique opportunity to help amazing startups grow into Internet powerhouses.

I’m the West Coast community development manager for Catalyst, so I get to tell the SoftLayer story to hundreds of entrepreneurs and startups every month at various meetups, demo days, incubator office hours and conferences. In turn, I get to hear the way those entrepreneurs and startups are changing the world. It’s a pretty amazing gig. When I was chatting with a few of my colleagues recently, I realized that I’m in a pretty unique position … Not everyone gets to hear these stories. I’ve decided that I owe it to my coworkers, our Catalyst participants and anyone else who will listen to write a semi-regular blog series about some of the cool businesses SoftLayer is helping.

Picking one Catalyst participant to feature for this first blog was a pretty challenging task. With the holidays upon us, one company I’m working closely with jumped out as the perfect candidate to feature in this “season of giving”: GiveToBenefit.

GiveToBeneift (or G2B) is a social enterprise based in Philadelphia dedicated to helping non-profits receive high-quality goods from select suppliers through crowd-funding. G2B is unique among the startups in the Catalyst program in that it is a “double bottom line” company: It is designed to generate profit for its business while at the same time creating positive social impact.

Crowd-funding — raising money from the public via online donations — is a relatively new activity, but it has already become a HUGE market. In 2010, more than 38 million people gave $4.5 billion to causes online … $4.5 BILLION dollars were donated online to fuel ideas and businesses. Chances are, you’ve heard of companies like Kickstarter and DonorsChoose, so instead of taking time to talk about the crowd-funding process, I can share how GiveToBenefit differs from those other platforms:

The idea is to go beyond “doing good,” to “doing better.” I could go on and on about the innovate ways they’re “discovering better ways to do good,” but the best way to show off their platform would be to send you to the three campaigns they recently launched:

Whether you want to contribute to purchasing a Watermark water purification system for the Margaret E. Moul Home for people with neuromuscular disabilities or you want to fill the People’s Light & Theatre and Plays & Players Theater with the beautiful sounds of Hailun Pianos, you can contribute and know that your donation is making a difference for some very worthy non-profits.

If you’d like to learn more about GiveToBenefit or if you think one of your favorite non-profits could benefit from a G2B campaign, let me know (jkrammes@softlayer.com), and I’ll introduce you to G2B founder and visionary Dan Sossaman.

-@JoshuaKrammes

Having been client in the past, I already had some idea of how amazing the SoftLayer team was. Every interaction I had with the company was fantastic, and though I’ve worked with hundreds of service providers in different industries, I can wholeheartedly say that the service I received at Softlayer was better than any I’d ever experienced. As you can imagine, that left a pretty phenomenal impression on me.

When the opportunity came up a couple of months ago to interview with Paul Ford and the Community Development team, my response was almost instinctual: I jumped at the chance. Having met him and several members of the team in San Francisco in the past (picture below), I knew the kinds of individuals he surrounded himself with — incredibly smart, talented, hard-working, and just downright COOL people. That’s right … Seldom do you find a team in a corporate environment where you can actually say the people are all awesome — people you would want to hang out with even if you didn’t work with them.

After going through the interview process, I hopped on a plane to Dallas to visit the Alpha headquarters. In the whirlwind of introductions and training sessions, I was surprised how productive the trip ended up being. I met most of the folks I’ll be working with on a regular basis, and I had the opportunity to learn more and more about what Community Development is doing. And I was blown away at how much of that work was being done for other companies. The impression I get is that the impact Community Development is having on the business community is real, it’s measurable and it’s making a difference. It’s impactful. From mentorship to event sponsorship to expert recommendations about infrastructure and architecture, nowhere in the industry can you find a company that works so hard for its customers. Trust me. I looked. Nowhere.

When I returned to San Francisco (where I live and will be based), I happened upon the Game Developers Conference where SoftLayer was present in a big way. I grabbed lunch with an existing client, I could tell their interaction with our team was no different from mine when I was a customer: Both sides clearly work together to find a solution that works for everyone. The interaction seemed to transcend the traditional “client-vendor” relationship, and it was clear that the Softlayer team was deeply committed to the client’s mission and product offering.

Learning all of the different ways Softlayer is helping them (beyond providing server and hosting solutions) was would have been astounding … If I didn’t already kind of expect it from my experience. I couldn’t help but be ecstatic about what’s to come.

I met with the team at the GDC booth and got some more first-hand perspective about how we’re embraced by the community. Walking the show floor and coming back to our almost-always-crowded booth (after seeing so many other booths quiet and empty) reinforced my feeling that I joined one of the most exciting companies in the industry. Our Server Challenge kept the booth BUSY for the entire time I was at the show — both days.

Observing how our team engaged the visitors drove home a point I touched on earlier: That SoftLayer employees CARE about every client and prospect. They asked questions about the attendee’s business, what the business’s needs were, and (most impressively to me) held back on “the hard sell.” And that’s pretty unique in itself.

As I embark on week number two of my employment (and beyond), I can’t wait to learn more and more so I can become an integral part of the team. If you’re ever on the West Coast and want to talk SoftLayer, hit me up!

-Joshua