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It is funny how things progress in life. While attending college in Texas I was the person the IT guys hated. It never failed that whenever I entered a computer facility things usually ended up with smoke and a lot of expletives. I seemed to have the wonderful knack of breaking anything I touched that was computer related. After graduation, I moved to California and started a recruiting business with a few buddies. This is where I learned my first little bit of technology (it was out of necessity and cheapness). Plus it also helped me vet candidates before sending them on interviews. That skill led me to a company I still have a lot of respect for today and responsible for helping me grow the skill set that allowed me to co-found StrongMail. The company was called L90 and the technology we delivered was call adMonitor. This was an advertising and email platform we ran as an ASP and the company did extremely well. We had well over 3000 blue chip customers, a super team, and excellent technology. At our peak we were serving well over 8 billion transactions a month and chomping at the heels of DoubleClick.

When I started with L90 I was doing corporate recruiting to help reduce the amount of fees that they were spending on hiring talent in a very difficult market. After roughly 4 months of doing this and meeting my partner in crime (Frank Addante, who was the CTO and founder of L90, serial entrepreneur and pretty much the most driven guy I have ever met) I feel he quickly saw a skill in me that I wasn’t even sure I had. I started to run IT operations having no prior knowledge in this industry and then within a few months started building out the infrastructure that enabled our billions of transactions. The coolest thing about doing this was the challenge and scale. The entire industry used a system called Keynote to track competitors’ availability. High-scale and redundancy were a must.

So how did this all lead to founding StrongMail you might ask? It’s simple. At L90 we relied on many systems to produce results and they were a nightmare to maintain. I only had a staff of 2 people and we had a ton of gear (close to 800 systems). The challenge we had at L90 was it took many programmers to write custom code to allow our customers the flexibility to do what they desired. It also took a lot of hardware to run open source software (we used Sendmail) and that technology was really intended to run corporate email like Exchange. I love open source and we used it anywhere we could but it just was not designed to meet the needs of the outbound email and delivery. We parlayed the challenges we learned by running a very successful business and realized there was a gap in the market (at least we were hoping there was). Building this stuff is not easy, its takes a lot of time and effort and it is hard to scale. In my next entry I will discuss the problem itself and how we address it at StrongMail.