Interview: David Geller of EyeJot and WhatCounts

Hopefully it hasn't been too long! I was lucky to be selected for an internship at GTE Telenet when I was in my second year at GWU in Washington, DC. It was funny in the beginning. They asked for my salary requirements and the number I gave them was several thousand dollars per year less than the minimum they were setup to pay for FTEs. So, I had to accept more, which was totally cool. It was a great job, but only an internship. I then went to Computer Consoles which had its roots in early directory assistance systems and related telephony stuff. Big time Unix shop. We even designed our own processor called the "Tahoe" to compete with DEC's Vax product line. I worked alongside some of the people that would go on to create BSD Unix and form the big Internet ISP UUNet that Microsoft eventually bought.

So, you are associated with both WhatCounts and EyeJot is that right? You run both?

Yep - founded them both. I have been involved in email-related technologies since the early 90's. That's what brought me to Seattle, from DC. I had written a small office email system named NvMail. It was pretty good. Even had integrated voice mail capabilities. So, I've always loved building tools and platforms that help people communicate. This led me to start WhatCounts with a former colleague of mine Brian Ratzliff, who serves as WhatCounts' President. We met at Starwave (one of Paul Allen's companies that created ESPN.com, ABCNews.com and many other important sites) and decided in 2000 to create something that would provide email publishing and analytic tools for companies that need to communicate, efficiently, with their customers. We were one of the first, robust ASP solutions in the ESP (email service provider) space. Today we're lucky to count as clients companies like Alaska Airlines, Costco, Ziff-Davis, The Seattle Times and many other firms located throughout North America and Europe. And we sell our solution on an appliance in addition to our ASP/SaaS solution. We're really the only vendor to do that.

A few years ago I was having trouble coordinating live video chats between my, then, three-year-old daughter and my parents in California. Suffice it to say, I thought a product like Eyejot would be useful - something that married video with a communications model like email, something I knew a lot about. So, I started that firm and it has been growing steadily the last two years. Today we're merging some of the functionality that's in Eyejot with the advanced email and analytic capabilities of WhatCounts.

The key to my being involved with both companies is really quite simple. Eyejot is small enough to almost be on auto-pilot (thankfully, we designed it extremely well and it's been one of the most stable platforms I've every worked on) and WhatCounts has a great leadership team and a very professional and dedicated staff. And, truth be told, I run both companies very conservatively. Both are privately held, largely self-funded and have grown organically, relying upon great customers to expand our opportunities.

How is Eyejot different than say, email and/or YouTube for communicating?

Eyejot is principally a way for one person to create and send a private video to another individual or a small group of people. For consumers it's most often used to connect family and friends - whether they're spread across the country or the world. Many families with members serving in the armed forces overseas rely on Eyejot to keep in touch. No one wants those private conversations on YouTube! Businesses, too, have started realizing the potential that video mail has and have started using it to communicate with their customers. We have professionals in numerous fields using Eyejot including real estate, life sciences and medicine, finance, customer support, publicity, education and more. These types of users are actually the centerpiece of Eyejot's business model. And yes, Eyejot is profitable and self-sustaining.

You've seen some success as an entrepreneur. Why do you think you've been so successful?

I'm passionate about the projects I get involved with and I'm lucky to, I suppose, have skills both as an organizer and a technology person. I really enjoy programming and think I'm pretty good at it. I'm in touching the Eyejot code-base at least every few days - whether it's to add new features or improve the ones we already have. WhatCounts is a little bigger, as a company, so it has matured to the point that I'm not actively working on the code there. But, I remain involved in technology architecture planning for both companies. And, I think, it's my roots as a software developer that has helped me grow both companies wisely.

I always wonder what my fellow tech geeks do when not sitting behind their computer. What are your hobbies?

Beside spending time with my family I'm a big movie fan - especially going to a theater with a huge screen. I'm not even that particular about what's playing. I just thoroughly enjoy being in an environment that forces my attention in one direction and entertains me. That's something most of us can't do in our homes. It's even more fun when I can bring my six year old daughter and observe her getting caught up in something big and magical. The only thing that has interfered with my love of movies was taking a film course a couple of years ago to learn more about the movie making process. It was extremely cool and I'm amazed at how complex it is to produce a movie - even a bad one. But, I found myself spending too much time looking at how movies were made, from lighting, to camera placement, to sound that it became hard to follow the actual stories. Thankfully I've backed off a bit from that and am back to being a fairly normal movie watcher.