Hey guys – my name is Jason Shen and I’m proud to be the newest addition to the isocket team!

Today, July 12th, is my first official day. But it feels like longer because I’ve been getting to know these guys through interviewing and training.

My job title is Customer Scout. You’ll be seeing more of me if you are interested in working with isocket or at local events. I’ll be playing counterpart to Ryan’s Customer BFF role. He and I are both part of the “Customer Team” – our job is to provide excellent service and help spread the word about isocket.

A little about my past:

Until last month, I was cutting my teeth in advertising as the business manager of The Stanford Daily. I oversaw operations, the ad sales & finance teams and the financial performance for our 118-year old independently incorporated newspaper. I also saw how powerful (and lucrative) premium display ads could be for our organization – which is part of why I’m so excited about isocket.

Before the Daily, I cofounded a microfinance oriented social venture, got a BS & MS from Stanford University, and spent 10 years as a nationally competitive gymnast. I was proud to be the Captain of the NCAA Div I National Championship Men’s Gymnastics team at Stanford.

I’m super excited to start kicking butt at isocket – we have an awesome team, a really useful product and some big plans to build toward. If you have any more questions about me or know of any publisher who wants an easier way to do direct and self-serve display ads, drop me a line at jason at isocket dot com.

We know many of you have been waiting for access to isocket and believe me, we’ve been anxious and working furiously to get it in your hands!  We consider this the beginning of a public beta (since the product is still a work in progress) – but specific wording aside, the big news is that we’re ready to start opening the doors.

The time that we had in private beta testing was time very well spent. We learned a lot about you, what you wanted and the direction of where isocket will be heading in the future thanks to our early beta testers.

So as part of this launch there is a ton of new stuff going live. Here’s some highlights:

Want To Sell Ads With isocket? Apply Now!

If you want to start selling ads through isocket, we’d love to have you!  Publishers who want to join go through a short application and approval process. The application is open as of today. You can start with the tour or skip directly to the application – it should take about 3 minutes.

Why do publishers apply?

We are requiring this application process to keep the quality of our marketplace high – you’ll make more money if advertisers know what they’re buying is legitimate. Many websites out there aren’t meant for direct sales, either because they are spammy, too small, etc. We’d be very sad to see someone pay for months of isocket service and not sell any ads, so if we really think that will happen, we’ll politely say so.

Want To Start Buying Ads?

If you want to buy ads through isocket there’s no application necessary. You just find the ads you want, and create an account during checkout. We’ll be releasing more features and ways to find inventory in the next few weeks. Check out our new advertisers page to see some of our featured inventory!

Brand Spankin’ New Public Pages

If you previously went to www.isocket.com looking for more info, you were probably dissapointed. While we were getting off the ground it acted as a placeholder and a way to measure interested in our product.  But today we’re launching the first versions of new public facing pages and it’s a big step forward for us – there’s detailed info about what we do, our main features, our pricing, a page with featured publishers, etc.

Be sure to go check it out and let us know what you think in the comments. My personal favorite is the about page, because our team rocks (and of course because there’s a handsome picture of me on there).

Full Redesign

A few weeks ago we quietly launched new designs for the advertiser-facing group, socket and checkout pages. For example, if you visit TechCrunch’s ad sales page, it’s a totally new look. The response has been great so far and advertisers report having a much easier time finding and buying the inventory they want.

Here’s a screen shot of the new socket page:

Versus a screen shot of the old version:

Dashboard and application redesign

Building off of the new design theme we started with the group pages, we’ve changed most of the look and feel of the product. These new designs also went live with this launch. One of the biggest things we wanted to improve was how you moved around the app and how things were organized.

Image of the new:

Versus image of the old:

Preview of things to come

This isn’t all that we’ve improved. We’ll be highlighting some additional features and announcements over the next few blogs posts. Some examples will be:

• A new account setup wizard.
• Custom socket images.
• Our pricing tiers.
• Order fulfillment – placing orders as a seller on behalf of buyers.

Over the past few months the isocket office has really been filling up and I gotta say that it’s been pretty nice having more people around. If we hopped into the Way Back Machine (and by way back I mean 3-4 months ago), you might remember me introducing Vinoth (aka the ‘Singapore Sensation’) to the team who was then followed up by our doubling down on designers with Eston and Al (and his dog Cosmo) who also joined the mix. Each of these additions have brought with them so much talent, experience, creativity and quirkiness it’s kinda crazy and as a combined force we have really put together an amazing team. Also I gotta say, since I was the first non-founder hired it’s been really cool to see the team come together. It hasn’t been easy, but we’re really starting to hit our stride.

With all of that being said, just when you think that the isocket team can’t possibly get any more awesome-er I am writing this post to officially let you know that yes, in fact we can and how we do that is by adding yet another talented engineer to our team. The engineer that I’m speaking of is a woman who has been around the world of technology for a long time and who is super excited to help us build isocket into a product that we all envision it can be. The only thing that she loves more than writing code is cooking up amazing food (she loves her husband a lot, too) and although she was a little surprised when she found out we had three office dogs, she now can’t imagine not having them around. Besides that, I’ll let the interview below fill you in on everything else you need to know about our newest addition to the team, Alicia Tang.

1. Hey Alicia, how about we start off with a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up and how long have you been living in California? Also, when you were first deciding to make the move, what actually made you make the jump?

I was born and grew up in a nice mid-sized city in northeastern China, where it snows every winter. I came to California in the hot summer of 2006 and stayed in L.A. for a year to get my masters in electrical engineering. I initially decided to come to the US because “the love of my life” went to Stanford so I guess you could say that it was love that eventually made me stay. I guess that’s as good of a reason as any, right?

2. I hear that you have an interesting story as far as how you got accepted to the college where you ended up studying. What are some of the details of that story and what college did you end up attending?

Technically, I finished high school in about one year, which basically got me a free pass to any college nation-wide. That year was the hardest and best year of my life so far. I was on the province team (team of 5) and was the first girl in the previous six years that landed a spot for physics Olympia. Little did I know that I would fall in love with my husband during the preparation for the final contest. So, I followed him to Peking University and studied Physics there.

3. Where did you work before you made your way to isocket and how did we track you down? What were your first impressions of the isocket team and what made you excited about working with us?

After 2 years of working at Symantec on their Veritas Server Cluster product I had the chance to meet some people who told me all about isocket. It sounded cool, so I decided to check it out for myself. My first impression was the big hand-draw isocket logo on the whiteboard in the entry room. When I saw that I knew that this was truly a startup.  The business model of isocket is simple and clean, and it only took me about 10 minutes to convince my husband that isocket rocks and that it’s the place for me.

4. When we first interviewed you I remember you mentioning that you built a web app for your husband in your spare time. What kind of app was it and what did you enjoy most about creating it?

The app is for manage/watch all our stock accounts. When it became the first website we both open every morning, I knew that it was definitely worth all the effort I put into it. Also, building this application moved me from system level, networking developer to application level, web developer. I learned java/php/javascript/ajax/mysql all by myself just so that I could build it. And during that whole process is when I really started to love developing web apps.

5. You’re the first female to work at isocket (besides Boomer, of course) – what’s it like working with a bunch of guys?

Ok, I have to admit that I am the second ‘official’ woman to be in the office, right behind Boomer. The female:male ratio at my high school was 1:4, at college was 1:9. So according to my past experiences, it’s pretty good here 1:5(2:7). Also, us girls like to get together. Boomer lays next to my feet once a while and that makes me feel warm and sweet. We’ve actually become good friends very quickly.

6. When you’re not sitting in front of your laptop, what do you enjoy doing? (you do get away from your laptop every now and then, right?)

If I’m not in front of the computer, I will most likely be in the kitchen. Cooking is art and it is what I would love to to do once I retire. Check out pics below for some examples of things I’ve cooked up in my spare time.

7. What do you think about the isocket dogs? Have you gotten used to them yet?

Dogs are part of isocket culture. Having them around makes all of the hard work here more relaxed and it also makes the office feel more like home. More importantly, dogs were born to be our companions and help us have fun and that’s just what the dogs here do.

I’m not sure if we’ve talked about this publicly yet, but we’re now actively starting to go through and send out invites from our awesomely long list of publishers who are interested in becoming part of our private beta. It’s something that we’re super excited about moving along with for many reasons, with one of the most important being the ability to have multiple publishers using our system and giving us all of the feedback we can handle as they each make their way into unchartered isocket territory.

This process provides a great experience for both our publishers and the team here at isocket because they have a chance to finally use and help shape a system that’s going to help them solve a problem that they’ve had for a long time (how to efficiently and easily sell and manage their direct online ad sales) and we end up benefiting from all of the great feedback they give us along the way. This feedback is very important and highly valuable to us and even though we don’t end up baking every idea that a publisher comes up with into our product, we still keep them all in mind as we’re coming up with new features and ideas.

As you can probably imagine, as we continue to bring on more and more publishers the amount of  feedback we’ll get will continue to grow as well. Keeping track of everything could get really complicated really quickly, so having a way to manage this process in an easy and transparent way is important, which is why we’re going to be using Uservoice to help us out. If you’ve never used Uservoice before, basically it’s a way for anyone to suggest new features, give feedback and actively keep track of the things that we’re working on, as we’re working on them.

One of the main reasons we like Uservoice is because not only can we add things that we’re currently working on (or thinking about working on) from our end, but anyone out there who has an interest in isocket can also post their ideas and feedback, too. The most important ideas get voted on and eventually bubble to the top, which will attract the attention of me and the rest of the team here at isocket.

If you have an idea you’d like to tell us or just simply want to check out what I’m talking about, head on over to our uservoice account now. Last night we added a bunch of ideas and feedback that we’ve either gotten from publishers or that we’ve been thinking about ourselves, so there’s some fresh stuff over there  just waiting for you to vote up, comment on or whatever else you feel like doing. It’s your world, we’re just living in it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

• Senior Inside Sales
• Director of / Lead Engineer
  
• Senior Software Engineers
• Senior Platform Engineers
• Front-End Designer / Engineer

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.

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:

• Tim Draper and Joel Yarmon for Draper Fisher Jurvetson
• David, Bruce and Bipul for Blumberg Capital
• Jeff Clavier for SoftTech VC
• Dave McClure for Founders Fund Angel
  
• David Cohen of Bullet Time Ventures and TechStars
• David, Lewis and Marc for Metamorphic Ventures
• Alexander Lloyd for Accelerator Ventures
• Marcus and Andy Ogawa for Quest Venture Partners
• Steve Gurasich, Co-Founder and CEO of the ad agency GSD&M IdeaCity
• Plug & Play Ventures
• Willem Schutte, David Weisburd, Hon Wah Chin, and Arjun Sethi

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.

We 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.