Two For The Price Of Two!

Hi! My name’s Al Abut and I’m the other recent hire at isocket. Eston and I are the new design team (my official job title is Startup Action Figure) and I’m excited about the big bet isocket is placing on the power of design to create compelling products. Our investor Dave McClure made waves in the design community recently by writing the article The Value Of Design To Startups in BusinessWeek and I’m pumped to join a team that takes the message to heart.

In fact, I was so excited that I wore a tie to my first day in the office yesterday. Granted, I wore it on my wrist but I’m sure that still counts.

Wearing a tie to work

If you see me in person sometime, I’ll tell you all about how John and I met, plus the weird connection to a mutual buddy in Bloomington named Kevin Makice. Let’s just say it’s amazing what a small world it is.

More about my background – I started off my career as a web developer at UC San Diego, working on a range of large websites focusing on science outreach. I launched two redesigns of the UCSD Division of Biology before working as a web developer for an environmental research initiative. I moved to San Francisco in late 2005 as an actionscript programmer making games at Wagerworks.

Startups are where my passion lie though and since 2007, I’ve specialized in designing for a wide range of early stage companies. One of the more interesting projects I’ve done was designing a retirement fund analyzer for Cake Financial. It was featured in the Wall Street Journal and Walt Mossberg commented that “I found the service clear and easy to use” as well as “simple, clear and relatively quick”. Cake was subsequently acquired by E-Trade. Other recent gigs included designing marketing pages for paid premium products, redesigning complex web applications and running user testing sessions.

Ok, enough of the boring stuff! I can’t rap like Eston but I have an awesome new puppy and he’s also an addition to the office ranks, so here’s some pics of Cosmo.

Here he is in my hometown of sunny San Diego.

Cosmo in Balboa Park

And ham that he is, here’s Cosmo doing the tourist thing at Pea Soup Anderson’s, complete with closed eyes.

Cosmo doing the tourist thing

March 3, 2010 | Filed Under Announcements, Company, isocket team awesomeness

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Our newest team member is a designer, not a rapper

Last Friday I got a DM from Hup asking me to “whip something up for the blog by Monday… to give a sense of my skillz and personality.” After my initial confusion (thinking Hup wanted me to redesign an entire blog in one evening,) I realised what he meant: a blog post. “Feel free to flex your creativity a bit,” he said.

Shit. I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let’s start over.

Hello. I’m Eston Bond. I left my job last week to come back to the startup fold after absurd amounts of relentless harassment a gentle coaxing by my friend John Ramey. Previously, I was a relatively early Product Designer at Facebook, the original creative director and game designer of Twitter game Spymaster, a consultant for various social gaming companies, and most recently Principal Interaction Designer at MySpace. I’m really, really excited to be working in a fast-paced environment again on product design for a demographic I haven’t worked with yet, so expect to see more from me and my fellow designer (I’ll let him disclose himself) on this blog about the challenges we face in iterating on isocket’s product and UI. There’s really nothing like working on the ground floor of a startup.

Christ. That was boring, too. I’m sorry.

Given the climate at MySpace at the moment, I’m going to have to take down my little nerdcore track for now just to be safe. Sorry guys!

Eston Bond is isocket’s new designer, with the official title of “Mad Hatter.” He challenges all geek rappers to leave some rhymes in the comments below.

February 22, 2010 | Filed Under Announcements, Company, Uncategorized, isocket team awesomeness

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Join The isocket Team – We Are Hiring!

Fresh off the heels of our funding announcement, we’ve just posted a new jobs page and some descriptions of what we’re looking for. We look forward to meeting and getting to know as many of you as we can!

Who We Need

Many startups pay lip service to the importance of the team and who they hire. We couldn’t take it more seriously. We believe there are exceptional people out there – maybe they’re already exceptional, maybe they haven’t had the chance yet – and we want them.

Many startup job postings talk about “Ninjas, Rockstars and Jedis”. We don’t want to use gimmicky words, we just want to work with the best people we can. It’s rewarding for everyone involved, and it’s the best way to build the best company.

We’ve tried to frame our job descriptions around “what the right candidate will be like” rather than the traditional “here’s a list of 20 tasks you will do every day”.

Because of this strategy and our size and stage, the actual job titles and descriptions are flexible. In general, we need people to build / execute our product and people to care about / work with our customers. If you or someone you know could be a great fit, but aren’t sure if you fit a specific posting, say hello anyway!

Open Positions

What about Junior-level positions and internships? If you think you’re a fit and up to the challenge, email us ( join at isocket dot com) and tell us why.

Why You Should Join

In our job postings, we talk a lot about what we bring to the table. Bottom line: this is a unique opportunity for the right people. There are very few places in the world other than Silicon Valley where you can enjoy the startup lifestyle and all it can reward you with.

August 27, 2009 | Filed Under Announcements, Company

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isocket Raises $2M In Funding From Top Investors

We’re excited to announce that isocket has closed a $2 million round of seed funding!

We’ve been quiet recently. The isocket team has been very busy since the launch of our private Beta with TechCrunch earlier this summer. In addition to working with new customers and working as fast as we can on product development, Zak and I have been looking for ways to grow the company so we can scale.

We know many of you are itching to try out the service – now we can ramp things up and get the product into more peoples hands, faster.

The A-Team

We are honored by the investors who have lost their minds believe in what we’re working on. These people are awesome:

Please join me in welcoming them to the project. We are excited that such a great group of people believe in isocket and will be contributing to our growth. We look forward to working with them!

The Starting Line

Raising capital is one of the hardest and biggest hurdles for startup founders. As a result, many entrepreneurs make funding the goal – in other words, it becomes the finish line.

But for Zak, myself, and all the new team members who will be joining us – this is the starting line. We now have the resources we need to start growing isocket into what we know it can be.

We’re Hiring!

isocket is hiring. We just announced a bunch of open positions at our (future) office in San Mateo, CA. Engineers, designers, sales – you name it, we probably need it.

Are you or someone you know incredibly talented and passionate? Want to join one of the few newly funded companies in the Valley? Say hello.

August 27, 2009 | Filed Under Announcements, Company

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TechCrunch Picks isocket For Direct Ad Sales

TechCrunch LogoWe are very excited to announce and welcome TechCrunch as the newest addition to our private Beta! Just in case you are new to the internet, TechCrunch is one of the largest, most influential blogs in the tech and start-up world and is read by over 2 million people per day.

We are honored that TechCrunch would choose isocket to power their ad sales. They see a lot of technology companies and had their pick of the litter, so their faith in us was humbling and motivating. You can read their announcement about isocket here.

If you’d like to be a part of our private Beta as well, you should sign up for the waiting list on our homepage! We’ll be sending out invites on a first-come, first-serve basis in the coming weeks and months.

You should definitely take a look at TechCrunch’s ad sales pages. Here is the direct sales page on their website and here is their isocket profile / Media Kit page. They are also offering a 20% launch discount on all their ads! If you make your purchase during the month of May, you can apply this discount to any campaign through the end of 2009!

One of the coolest things that the TechCrunch team wanted to accomplish by moving their ad sales onto isocket was to make it easier for more advertisers, especially start-ups, to have the chance to advertise on TC.

Since isocket makes it easier to buy and sell advertising, TC is able to offer more options, including new ad packages that run for a day. For example, you can promote the launch of your startup or product by purchasing all of the premium ads on TechCrunch’s main page for one day, and all it takes is a few clicks on isocket (you can watch a video sneak peak here)!

We’d like to thank TC head hacker Henry Work for sourcing and championing us, Heather Harde for giving us the chance, and Michael Arrington for supporting startups both on and within TechCrunch. Laguna is pretty awesome too. They work hard over there but have a great time doing it.

May 8, 2009 | Filed Under Announcements, Beta, Community

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