From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Joe founded CloudHealth as an EIR at a Boston VC firm. Last year the SaaS company had 300 customers. The story explores how he achieved product market fit and found its stride.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Joe Kinsella: I grew up in a little town outside of Syracuse, New York. It’s just a little urban town out in the middle of nowhere. I spent my life right through college in the New York area. I took a Computer Science degree. I noticed that there were a lot of tech companies in Boston and San Francisco. I put a lot of thought into it and decided to head out to Boston and started looking for a job.

I found my first job with a software company called Easel Corporation. If you’re familiar with Scrum, that was my first software team out of college. From there, I got hooked into venture-backed startups and the entrepreneurial community. I did a series of companies over the years. It all culminated into my latest venture CloudHealth.

Sramana Mitra: Can you put some chronology around this? When were you working for this company? What time rame in the history of technology is this all happening?

Joe Kinsella: I graduated in 1991. I did a company called Easel Corporation that had done an IPO and was actually a public company for a period of time. It was acquired by a database company. That first team was highly innovative. We were building an environment for building enterprise applications. Many of the constructs that we rely on today from dynamically typed languages to having runtime environments were things that we built at Easel for supporting the development of applications by enterprises.

It was a great environment. After that, I did a startup called ProCD that ended up being acquired by Axiom. I did a spin out of the MIT Media Labs called FireFly. I did my own startup called Tarragon back at the end of the dot-com boom.

Sramana Mitra: What years were you at that first company?

Joe Kinsella:  I worked there up until 1995.

Sramana Mitra: So you left in 1995. What happens next? 1995 was when FireFly started. I was at MIT at that time as a graduate student.

Joe Kinsella: Prior to that, I did a company called ProCD. I had a technical focus. You can see that pervade my whole career. I reached the point where I wanted to be Lead Engineer and I’ve done some pre-senior work at Easel, but I hadn’t led a team. I went off to a company called ProCD, which built a series of software products that, at that time, were CD-ROM-based.

As the Internet started, we started to bring that all online. We won a number of awards for best software. They were called Cody Awards at that time. Then I went and joined FireFly. FireFly was fairly early in its development. I still remember one of our early customers was an online bookseller that happened to be called Amazon. At that time, it wasn’t clear that Amazon was going to be a big success. I ended up expanding into a role where I was leading a community team there. We built some interesting products. Those were crazy times.

This segment is part 1 in the series : From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth
1 2 3 4 5 6 7