Building a Cloud-Based Property Management Platform, Ric Leutwyler, President of SkyTouch (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Your number one competitor is Oracle, based on what I just heard, because Oracle is moving all their stuff to the cloud. It’s reasonable to expect that you’re going to have Oracle as a major competitor because Oracle has a big emphasis over on-cloud technology.

Ric Leutwyler: Of course. There are a number of others as well that are playing in this area in trying to achieve what we’ve already achieved. I think it’s been very interesting to watch the space because you’ve people making inroads in very different ways. >>>

Bootstrapping to Inc. 500: Tallie CEO Chris Farrell (Part 1)

Chris and his co-founder bootstrapped Tallie to a high growth Inc. 500 company in four years. After that, the product had to be re-architected, and slowed down for a couple of years, before picking up again. Read how they have competed in a crowded marketplace and built a robust position.

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

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Building a Cloud-Based Property Management Platform, Ric Leutwyler, President of SkyTouch (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Does the team at SkyTouch have ownership? Are there options?

Ric Leutwyler: The compensation is a mixed bag. There is some level of ownership but there isn’t anything to own yet of SkyTouch because there isn’t a separate entity to have valuation in. Our plans to create that kind of equity opportunity for team members is still not something we focus on.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get into the business. What is the business of SkyTouch? What do you do?

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Building a Cloud-Based Property Management Platform, Ric Leutwyler, President of SkyTouch (Part 2)

Ric Leutwyler: That was about the time when Choice Hotels contacted me and said they wanted someone to come in who has experience in hospitality and technology and also has entrepreneurial interest. They thought I may be a fit for that and I remember walking out and texting my wife that this was a dream job. This is a startup that’s not a startup because what Choice Hotels was saying is, “We want to give you a platform we built over the last 10 years or so and rolled it out to 5,600 hotels. We want to give you the people that built it, implemented, and supported it. We want to give you ourselves as a customer at around $30 million a year and we want you to take this into the marketplace and sell it to everyone else in the industry so you create greater shareholder value for Choice’s shareholders.” >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: So there is a lot going on in the virtual currency payment space. That whole area right now is very active innovation-wise.

Jeff Lawson: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: It’s probably the most active it has been in a long time.

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Building a Cloud-Based Property Management Platform, Ric Leutwyler, President of SkyTouch (Part 1)

Everything is moving to the cloud and hotels are no exception. Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised?

Ric Leutwyler: I was born in Austin, Texas. I have moved 18 times in my life and career in the US. I have a double degree in both Marketing and Human Resources as I had interest in both areas. I started my career with AT&T before the divestiture. It was one of the largest companies in the world. I was involved with different parts of the organization during my time there. I think I was in eight different roles in eight and a half years. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 6)

Jeff Lawson: Now what you’re seeing in Web 2.0 is this more vertically integrated approach where instead of just veneer on top of the existing industry, you actually have companies that are cutting all the way through the stack and existing industry to provide a better solution overall. Coming back to homes, I can now buy a home, end-to-end, using WebGen. I can even buy a Tesla e-commerce on their website. That’s the end-to-end experience of Tesla using software. Look at Airbnb. It’s actually getting me in the room that I’m going to be renting. Same thing goes for Uber. It’s actually the means and the entirety of the customer experience. That’s a fascinating trend. This is the next evolution of using software, the Internet, and technology to disrupt businesses. The first one was just the veneer on top. Now we’re cutting deep into actually providing the service as well, which is on the consumer side. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How do you describe the value proposition of what you’re delivering to your customer base today?

John Sundberg: Generally speaking, most companies already think that they’re all messed up internally and it’s very hard for them to get something done. They already see the pain. What we do is we come in and say, “For these internal processes, we’ve got a system that is straightforward to create forms that people fill out and workflow processes are structured so that requests don’t get dropped. It is automated and you get visibility to it at all times. In a general sense, the average employee makes at least 10 requests a year. With our automated software, they save $10 per request. That’s savings of $100 per employee per year. If you take a look at a company with 5,000 employees, that’s savings of $500,000.”  >>>