My Thoughts

Ads Around Town

Some ads around town from the coolest company around!

Look Up, We're Hiring!

We recently hired two Virginia Tech students to help us find creative ways to spread the word about some of the jobs we're looking to fill here in Blacksburg. Here is a picture of the first project they pulled off. Pretty creative, I must admit!

Webmail.us + Rackspace: The Most Dominant Force in Business Email?

I think so! But maybe I'm a little biased.

As you may have seen, we announced today that we are merging with Rackspace. I am extremely pumped about joining forces with the Racker crew and continuing to build our business with such a great group of people. This is a really exciting time for our company, all of our people, our community, and our customers.

Inside Webmail, we have been positioning this as Phase II of our company history. We believe that during this phase the market is really going to open up, leaders are going to emerge, and followers are going to fall behind. We thought long and hard about how to make sure we're positioned to be the leader in our space and we feel that aligning with Rackspace is the answer.

One thing I want to be really clear about: this is by no means an exit strategy for any of us. Bill, Kevin, and I are super-driven and so is the rest of our team. We are as bullish as ever about where this industry is headed and the leadership role that's at stake.

The last few months have been an unbelievable time for me personally. I feel extremely privileged to be going through these times as an entrepreneur and I am excited to share my experiences with many of you in the coming months and years. Stay tuned!

If you would like to learn more about our merger with Rackspace, here are some helpful links:

The Webmail Blog: We have merged with Rackspace!

The Roanoke Times: Webmail gets ready to grow

Racklabs: Welcome Webmail!

News Channel 7 Video: More jobs coming to Blacksburg company

Rackspace: Webmail.us Joins the Rackspace Family

Read/Write/Web: Webmail.us Acquired by Rackspace

GigaOM: Rackspace Enters Small Biz Email Race

I will continue to update this post with more links to further coverage.

Inc. Magazine: Webmail.us is the 217th Fastest Growing Private Company in America

According to Inc. Magazine, we are the 217th fastest growing private company in America. This also makes us the fastest growing email specialist on the Inc. 500 list and the fastest growing business overall in Southwest Virginia.

We believe that email is the most critical business communication tool in the world and luckily, a growing number of businesses don't want to manage it themselves. They turn to us because we're a specialist—we're 100% focused on providing email services to businesses.

I can't express how proud I am of our team for this accomplishment. And we are obviously growing, so, if you want to join the fastest growing email specialist on the Inc. 500, the fastest growing company in Southwest Virginia, and one of the best places to work in this region, check us out.

We Host Email for More Than 60,000 Businesses

We surpassed a huge milestone last month... we now host email for more than 60,000 businesses and more than a half million email users. All of these numbers represent paying customers as we focus specifically on business-class email and do not provide free email accounts to consumers like many of our competitors.

To put this in perspective, we hosted email for 10,000 businesses at the end of 2005 and 20,000 in June of 2006.

We Are One of the Best Places to work in Southwest Virginia

For the second year in a row, the Blue Ridge Business Journal named us one of the best places to work in Southwest Virginia. We work really hard to build an awesome culture at Webmail and we take a lot of pride in this type of recognition.

A business leader who I respect a lot asked me, "What's the secret sauce?"

Here was my response:

I think the key is to genuinely care about your people and the culture you build around them. I don't really believe there is a secret sauce though. I just think that most businesses don't genuinely care... and don't understand the value that gets created when you do build that culture.

In all reality, we work really hard on culture building. We don't always get it right and we're not doing close to what we want to be doing... but I definitely think we've built one of the best places to work in our region... and beyond. But don't take my word for it. Read some of our employee testimonials.

And by the way... we're hiring like crazy.

Executive Promotions

We recently promoted two people here at Webmail to VP-level positions.

Ben Hubbard is now our Vice President of Business Operations. Ben is in charge of customer care and SMB sales and scaling those teams with the growth of our company while ensuring high quality at every level. Ben is going on year #5 at Webmail and has been instrumental in helping us establish ourselves in the email hosting market.

Adam Williams is now our Vice President of Partner Relations. This is a newly formed division within our company. Adam is in charge of ensuring the success of our reseller partners by making their transition an easy one and then maintaining relationships post-partnership. Adam is going on year #3 and has helped us establish our successful reseller program in his previous roles.

Here is a nice write-up by theWhir on the two promotions.

I'm very proud of both of these guys. Both individuals have been with us for a long time, have been very loyal to me and the company, and have achieved a tremendous amount of success—within Webmail and beyond.

CIO Insight: Amazon Case Study Featuring Webmail.us

CIO Insight just released a case study called Amazon at Your Service detailing Amazon and their web services initiatives. We interviewed with Ed Cone several weeks ago and ended up being one of the main features of the article. I think Ed did a good job of explaining how we work with Amazon, why we work with them, and how they fit into our overall infrastructure plan.

Working with Amazon...

Last week we announced that we're now using Amazon S3 to backup and encrypt email data on a nightly basis. We got a decent amount of press out of this and we collaborated on a case study that is now on the Amazon website.

Here are links for more information if you're interested:

- Amazon helps Webmail with data by The Roanoke Times

- Amazon Case Study

- Details on how we are using S3

This is a really big deal for us, for all of the reasons mentioned in the case study and the Roanoke Times article. If anyone has any questions, let me know. We're happy to talk about all the benefits of working with Amazon.

The Roanoke Times on Webmail.us [and Google]

The Roanoke Times wrote a nice article on us today, emphasizing the launch of Harbinger and our aim to provide an alternative to desktop email software. Wouldn't you know it though—Google has made their way into articles about us in our local newspaper! You can't see it from the online version of the article, but in the paper, the subtitle of the article reads:

Webmail: Google also enters same market

I don't know whether to laugh or cry!