Helping Publishers Monetize Premium Ad Inventory: isocket CEO John Ramey (Part 3)

Sramana: Let’s talk about how you oriented yourself to establish isocket. You had received multiple points of validation. What was your next step?

John Ramey: All of this had occurred in Bloomington, Indiana, which was a college town in the middle of nowhere. There is no web community or startup vehicle out there, but I stayed there partly out of fear and partly because that is what I knew. I was even a bit anti-Silicon Valley. I felt you could do it anywhere, so I stayed there for a year and ended up beating my head against a wall. I went to Chicago a lot, but I was not getting anywhere because the culture there is not conducive for tech startups. Their idea of a high-tech startup in that region is a faster assembly line.

Most of the angel investors there were doctors and gas station owners. I was pitching a potential angel investor and I was talking about APIs and platforms. This was 2008, and one of the investors told me that he had just learned about blogging and he wanted to know how what we were doing jived with that. He was excited about being able to answer that question. I answered him, but in my head I knew I had to be out of there.

Two weeks later I was on the road. I put everything I owned in my car and drove to Silicon Valley. Before I had left, I had found an angel in the area who agreed to give me a bit of money. It was not a lot, but it was enough to get me to California and get me on my feet. I was in such a rush to leave that I left before closing the deal figuring we could close it on the road. I left the first week of September 2008. I was driving across the country and was in the desert, when I received a call from the investor who told me that the markets were going to hell and that he could not do the deal anymore. I had to pull over to a gas station and figure out if I should go out to California or if I should turn around and go home and live with my parents. I decided that because I had a little bit of money left I would just go for it.

The day that I drove into California was the day that Lehman Brothers fell. I was driving down the [highway] 101 looking at all the tech companies like a kid in a candy store. I was on cloud nine; meanwhile, the world was falling apart. I did not know where I was going, so I  just drove to Google which was anticlimactic. The day I got an apartment was the day the “Rest in Peace: Good Times” presentation came out. I had a lot of indicators that should have told a rational person to go home. Instead I got a crappy apartment, put my head down, and got to work.

At this point I had solidified the vision for the product. I knew what I was building, what the functionality would be, and what the use cases were. Over the next couple of months I lived on a three dollar-a-day food budget, so I went to a lot of startup events for the free food. By February 2009 I was starting to run out of money and I had only $1,200 left. Although I did not feel like doing it, I went to one of Dave McClure’s startup events, basically for the food. When I was there a serendipitous meeting happened. Somebody who knew who I was told somebody else who knew who I was that I was now in Silicon Valley. The next day, I got a call from TechCrunch asking me to come into the office in an hour.

They had heard about what I was working on and they said it was exactly what they needed. They wanted to be my first customer. I thought about it for a couple of days and decided I had nothing to lose. A couple of months later we came out of stealth with TechCrunch as our first customer. We were off to the races.

Sramana: How did you bridge the few months it took to build that product?

John Ramey: A week after we got TechCrunch, two angel investors put $100,000 into the company. When I moved here, I met a couple of people who took me under their wings. Gokul Rajaram was one of those investors. He told me it was good and starting taking me to different people. He obviously knows advertising, so that was very beneficial.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Helping Publishers Monetize Premium Ad Inventory: isocket CEO John Ramey
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