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32Q&A: How to Create a Core FinTech AppQ: Your award recognizes an individual who’s advanced a technological issue in the past year. What issue did you advance and how?A: We’ve been helping the compliance departments with their supervision efforts — something that is probably behind the scenes for most people who think about the financial services industry. But it’s a core application in financial technology.Basically, we capture, archive and store all of the electronic communications in the financial services organization. So that would include emails, instant messages, social media, text messages and so on. Most recently a lot of the work we’re doing is enabling financial services firms to use social media and other communications platforms that otherwise they would not be able to.Q: Would you say that that’s your 2013 innovation or is it a longer time frame?A: It’s a longer time frame. It wasn’t as if there was one event or one product that was released in 2013. It definitely has taken shape over several years.Q: How did you get into the business? Cloud computing came to the notice of the public years after you started your company. What did you know in 2001 that Amazon didn’t figure out before the middle of that decade?A: In 2001, when we started the company, the software-as- a-service, cloud or, at that time, application-service-provider [ASP] model [existed], so we didn’t originate this idea of “software-as-a-service” or “cloud.” We were just operating under this ASP type of model, where a customer could use our multi-tenant hosted service. That was another term that was used back at the time. And over time the term “cloud” became adopted. It now means many things. It means “in the cloud”; it means “software-as-a-service”; it also means something much more like Amazon’s cloud, the public cloud.Q: In 2001, this wasn’t the best environment for a start-up. What motivated you to go then, in that atmosphere?A: I had a business plan; I was trying to get funding for it and was struggling, not surprisingly, to get people interested. And throughout that period I had been doing some software development projects for financial services firms. And I had a few of them ask me to build email archiving solutions for them. It was about the same time that they were really addressing the email archiving and supervision regulationsset forth by the SEC and NASD [National Association of Securities Dealers].So it was really demand from customers. It was more the SEC and Rule 17a-4 [involving broker-dealer record keeping requirements].Q: How did you come to focus on the financial services industry? Was it a no-brainer? Do you have a financial background yourself?A: It was a no-brainer, given that those were the customers I had been working with. But prior to that, I had worked at two companies that kind of straddled finance and technology. They both provided technology to the financial services type of customers. I’d always been interested in and involved in the financial services industry. Technology is mission-critical to everything they’re doing.Q: Is this one of those stories of a company that got started in a garage and then took off?A: Sort of. It wasn’t in a garage; it was in an apartment, a desk in an apartment. If I’d had a garage in Brooklyn, it would’ve probably started there. But the space was so small, we didn’t have one.Q: A desk in an apartment in Brooklyn. How many employees?A: Started with one, quickly went to three. The closest thing to this garage type of start-up, with people piled into it, there was an office when we were in Portland where we had 12 people crammed into a room that was probably the size of a medium bedroom.Q: What about Portland, Ore.? Are you located there because you grew up there? Why not Wall Street or Silicon Alley?A: The company was actually started when I was living in New York City. We set up an office in San Francisco about a year after that. It had most of our hosting and technology. And then, after a couple of years, we decided we wanted to move more of a presence back to New York and to shut down the San Francisco office.When we did that, we moved our hosting and headquarters up to Portland. And our much larger sales and service office was in New York.Q: What are your own biggest professional strengths? Are you mostly an entrepreneur, mostly a marketer, mostly an engineer? Or pick something else. What’s your core competency, to coin a phrase?A: Probably picking feedback from customers. I wouldn’t say that I’m particularly strong as a sales manager or a marketing> Continued from Page 31> Continued on Page 33AWARDS SUPPLEMENT 2014 | FTF NEWS MAGAZINE