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.

>>>

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.”  >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How big is your developer ecosystem? I imagine that part of your strategy is to unleash the whole creativity of the developer ecosystem on your platform.

Jeff Lawson: Yes, we have over 400,000 developers using our platform.

Sramana Mitra: Are these large companies? What’s the mix of that ecosystem?

>>>

Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is the ramp of the company? You said you did $100,000 and then $250,000 in the second year.

John Sundberg: We were doubling every year for about six years. Then it went flat for about five years during the economic slowdown. Last year, we did $7.5 million and the year before $5 million.

Sramana Mitra: You have not taken any financing? This is all bootstrapped, right?

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This is a very good discussion. Give me some more interesting use cases. What other segments or interesting creative ideas are you seeing in your developer ecosystem?

Jeff Lawson: We’ve got pretty much every sharing account including companies like Airbnb and TaskRabbit. In the sharing economy, you use technology to connect supply and demand using the Internet, and now more importantly, using mobile. Part of creating that market involves facilitating the transaction and communication between the buyer and seller. Twilio provides that to all these companies.

>>>