Testing the Cloud: SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos (Part 1)

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Tom Lounibos is the co-founder, president, and CEO of SOASTA, which provides cloud based web testing to optimize the functionality, performance, scalability, and reliability of websites and web applications. Prior to SOASTA, Tom served as president and CEO of Kenamea. Prior to Kenamea, he was CEO of Dorado Corporation, a financial services software provider. Previous to Dorado, he was EVP of Sagent Technology through its 1999 IPO and entrepreneur-in-residence at Crosspoint Venture Partners. He has held executive positions at Digitalk Corporation, Knowledgeware (KWI), and Encore Financial Services. Tom also serves on several boards in the Silicon Valley.

Sramana: Tom, let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where do you come from?

Tom Lounibos: I am from the Bay Area. I grew up as the youngest of nine kids. My father was a lawyer. I went to the University of San Francisco. My journey to technology was a bit different from most. I was actually drafted by the Minnesota Twins as a baseball player, but I turned them down to join Burroughs in 1978. That has been fodder for many of my friends. I have had a lot of people laugh at me for that.

Sramana: What did you do after college?

Tom Lounibos: I had a few options. Everybody in my family thought I was going to go to law school because a lawyer is what everyone in my family has been. However, I went down the least-traveled path for my family and started doing sales for Burroughs. I had job offers from IBM and Burroughs and I just liked the people at Burroughs a bit more. They are now Unisys.

I started off at Burroughs, and I did not like the idea of being a salesperson but I found out that I was pretty good at it. I ran the Los Angeles and Southern California branch and I was the youngest branch manager in the company. I always told people that I was probably the worst branch manager at Burroughs because I was not well equipped at 25 to manage 40- and 50-year- olds. That is just how the market was back then.

When I left Burroughs, I took an interesting route. It was the mid-1980s and I decided to focus on startups. At that time, however, startups were not nearly as popular as they are now. I started a company with three other guys called Encore Financial Services that we eventually sold. From that point on I have never looked back, and I have never worked for a large company since. I have done six startups since then, and I have been fortunate enough to have been involved with two IPOs.

I was involved with Knowledgeware, which was involved in the development side of the fence, particularly with client server applications. In the mid-1980s we were trying to figure out how to build distributed applications. We came up with a formula and category called computer aided software engineering. We were a leader in that space and partnered with IBM and grew to be a $100 million annual revenue company. We went public in 1988 and were one of the high flyers on NASDAQ.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Testing the Cloud: SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos
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