From Laid-off Engineer To Successful Startup CEO: Michelle Munson of Aspera (Part 7)

SM: Since you have set up the company as an equity-based structure, you are going to have to exit it. If you were going to keep it you would have needed a different structure. MM: Definitely. We would like to sell the company as a strategic acquisition to a company that can make use of

Read Full Article »

From Laid-off Engineer To Successful Startup CEO: Michelle Munson of Aspera (Part 6)

SM: What was your ultimate design goal? MM: The first problem we aimed to solve was how to make a re-transmission machine, a control system that retransmits data at a rate that matches the channel capacity for any packet loss rate over the channel and any delay. That was our design goal.

From Laid-off Engineer To Successful Startup CEO: Michelle Munson of Aspera (Part 5)

SM: You were able to find a starting point in the open source community? MM: I found a good model from a different domain that we experimented with, and it worked well. That was the point at which we started making the protocol.

From Laid-off Engineer To Successful Startup CEO: Michelle Munson of Aspera (Part 4)

SM: What was the problem the digital media companies were facing that you wanted to solve? MM: I knew it was a problem in application layer networking, which was something I had always had an interest in. I liked the theoretical underpinnings of it. I could see there was a layer which was unsolved.

From Laid-off Engineer To Successful Startup CEO: Michelle Munson of Aspera (Part 3)

SM: Concepts coming before their time happens a lot here in Silicon Valley. MM: It sure does. However, it was my first real experience in a startup with a peer group I was excited about. Partly because of my inquisitive nature, they used to send me out to customers as well. I gained a lot

Read Full Article »

From Laid-off Engineer To Successful Startup CEO: Michelle Munson of Aspera (Part 2)

SM: How large did the ISP become? MM: It was not very impressive. It had 700–800 subscribers and was entirely local. It was nothing like a serious business.

From Laid-off Engineer To Successful Startup CEO: Michelle Munson of Aspera (Part 1)

Michelle Munson is CEO of Aspera, a company she began after being laid off. Aspera was her realization that she could not only control her own career path but also create jobs for other people in a culture she established. This story is great inspiration for the thousands who have been let go by their

Read Full Article »

Building The Small Business CRM Solution: CircleDog CEO Charlie Crystle (Part 6)

SM: Operating under a traditional software licensing model, are you seeing any recurring revenues? CC: We do have support, but I also should point out that we are rolling out our online services such as online donations and email marketing. This year the non-profit side is profitable.