Our small project continues to grow! We’ve had some great wins over the last few months and even though we tried to keep some of them quiet, the cats were sneaking out of the bag…

Please welcome our newest teammate and VP Sales, Ben Trenda!

Ben joins us from the Rubicon Project, where he was VP Marketplace. During Ben’s tenure, Rubicon built what has become one of the world’s largest RTB platforms for remnant inventory, and developed Private Marketplaces for several major publishers. Before Rubicon Ben served as VP of Global Alliances and Agency Partnerships at AOL, and held various roles in Strategic Alliances at Yahoo/Overture before that

This is how we made our offer (love Jordan’s thumbs up face)

We’re super excited to welcome Ben and even in the little time he’s been here we’ve already cranked up the velocity. Say hola to Ben at @btrenda on LinkedIn or ben [at] isocket.

Oh, and some cash too.

I’m also happy to share that isocket has received additional VC funding from a mix of great new investors and all of our existing ones! We’re growing and have lots of awesome stuff coming down the pipe (stay tuned the next few weeks).

Plus we’re expanding our small team to include some additional engineers, a designer, and opening up a NYC office. Do you or someone you know love solving massive inefficiency problems or think advertising is rad? We’d love to meet you (or give you $5,000 for the referral!)

Now we can totally afford that “spa” treatment the team has been asking for

I Can Has Awesome Newz. We’re very happy to share that another awesome person has joined the isocket mission! Todd Sawicki is the Chief Revenue Officer of the Cheezburger Network (one of isocket’s super publishers) and an experienced advertising dude.

Todd is joining our advisory board, helping isocket slay the advertising beast along with great folks like Gokul Rajaram and David Scacco. We also recently welcomed KISSmetrics Founder & CEO Hiten Shah to our Board of Directors.

The official bio:

Todd Sawicki, Chief Revenue Officer at Cheezburger Network. He is an entrepreneur at heart with more than 16 years of experience in online startups, media companies and everything in between. Todd has worked in senior sales and marketing management with many startups at the cross roads of media and monetization including most recently Lookery and is on the advisory boards for Wetpaint and BuddyTV.

Please welcome Todd in the comments or on twitter @sawickipedia!

100 Pushup Challenge – Jason and Jordan of isocket from Jason Shen on Vimeo.

Taking a break from our regularly scheduled advertising announcements to share some cool stuff on our team.

Here at isocket we’re trying to disrupt an industry. And we know that to do that, we’ve got to prepare ourselves physically and mentally. Over the period of a month or so, Jordan and I followed the Hundred Pushups training regiment. This video is the culmination of that effort.

How does it feel to be a champion? It feels good.

We’re going to SXSW! For those who aren’t familiar, South by Southwest Interactive is a 5-day conference where ~15,000 geeks, entrepreneurs, bloggers and hackers come together to learn from each other and have some fun.

The isocket Customer team (John, Ryan, Jason, Amanda) are going to be there from Thursday through Monday. While Hup and John are veterans to SXSW, Amanda and I are newbies and together we’re going to be the Ultimate Make-Advertising-Suck-Less Ninja Force.

If you’re an isocket publisher, have advertised with us or are just curious about how you could train for the 100 pushup challenge – come say hi! We’d love to buy you coffee, a drink or a meal and chat about how we can make buying and selling advertising easier and more awesome.

We’ve met some really cool folks at other events like BlogWorld Expo and we’d love to connect with you at South by Southwest. The best way to get in touch is probably via twitter – we’re @isocket.

We’ll be stepping up our game to the next level. I mean, Hup and I did perform in front of hundreds of folks with a live band at The Palms Hotel during BlogWorld (and yes, there were handstand pushups involved) so who know’s what’s going to happen at SXSW? Hang out with us and find out!

Just how much awesome can you cram into one startup?! We’re excited to announce that Hiten Shah, web entrepreneur and contender for the web’s nicest and smartest person award, has joined isocket’s Board of Directors.

Many of you know Hiten because he’s very active in the web community and is the Co-Founder and CEO of the hot startup KISSmetrics. He gives great presentations about Lean Startups and metrics, and has a very valuable twitter feed for those of you interested in these topics.

Hiten started out by founding an Internet marketing consultancy, ACS. He then went on to create Crazy Egg, a popular analytics tool that visualizes the user experience on a website. Now with KISSmetrics he is building a data driven solution for online businesses. Hiten is passionate about helping other entrepreneurs and startup people.

This is the first time Hiten has accepted a Directorship, and we’re honored to have him. He’s already sat in one BOD meeting then jammed out with our product team afterwards – everyone loved it.

Please join me in welcoming Hiten to the isocket family by telling him a joke in the comments or @hnshah!

We conceived, built and launched a micro-product in 4 hours in a hotel room today! Here’s the story…

I have a confession. Today is me, John and Ryan’s first official day at the 2010 BlogWorld Expo, a conference all about blogging and we started it off by hacking together a website. Now, the whole point of coming to a conference is to meet people and do that face-to-face thing. But we got a really good idea and we had to execute it – what else would you expect from a bunch of geeks at a tech startup?

Ryan and I were talking about ways to get exposure and attention at BlogWorld while adding value to the attendees. What we concluded was that at the conference, everyone would be asking each other “What are you looking to get out of BlogWorld?”. This questions helps us understand who we’re talking to and whether we can help them, or ask them a question or connect them to someone else.

But there are tons of people at these things and you won’t get a chance to meet all the cool people you’re looking for. So we decided to create a site where people could post what they were looking for and find others based on stated interests.

And that’s when WhyICameToBlogWorld.com was born.

In about 4 hours we:

• bought the whyicametoblogworld.com domain name
• created a self-hosted wordpress installation
• registered the twitter handle @whyicame2bwe
• discovered & implemented TweetGrid, a real-time twitter search tool
• crafted the viral loop we’d use to get attention & share our message
• figured out how to run javascript on wordpress via the inline plugin
• experienced and recovered from a couple bug/failure issues
• and launched!

Ryan and I are customer facing guys at isocket but we both have technical chops too. I’m proud to have hacked together this site with him – how many sales guys do you know who could pull that off? =)

We eventually went down to the panel and met some folks interested in monetization – including the very cool Darren Rowse of Problogger who said his readers would be pretty interested in isocket.

I’m going to call that a good day.

It’s amazing how many advertising products and companies out there don’t support their customers… like, at all. Even normal online shopping sites make it difficult to find a phone number – and I’d argue that buying a trinket online is more straight forward than configuring an ad server or a multifaceted campaign.

–> Have you had any awful advertising support experiences? Share some horror stories in the comments!

Hopefully you’ve noticed that not only do we offer support… we barely stop short of throwing it in your face. isocket has a toll free phone number that any customer can call, and if it’s between 10am and 6pm Pacific, we make our best effort to have a real live currently-wearing-pants human pick up the phone.

We love talking with our current, potential, and past customers. We’re here to build an amazing product and company, and the best way to do that is by listening. We’re addicting to helping – so don’t be shy!

New support area + awesome learning guides

We’re starting to beef up our in-product help area. We just released a new support page, including a FAQ with an Ask Jeeves style input:

We also released a getting started guide and some tips about growing your ad sales. For example:

• How to price your inventory
• How to build an awesome .com/advertise sales page on your website
• How to find and reach advertisers
• How to promote your inventory

We’ll eventually blog out these guides and tips to the public. For now, they’re just for isocket users

Getting Started Guide

Once you’ve done the basic account setup, there’s still some work in configuring your ad zones and inventory packages (sockets). We know some publishers are new to the direct sales game or need a refresher – so check out this guide if you need help rounding out your account setup. It includes:

1. Basic account setup, billing, payout, etc
2. Setting up ad zones
3. Installing ad code on your website or ad server
4. Creating your ad packages (sockets)
5. Some isocket policies, like how we handle payments.

Hope they help – good luck!

Our small team is growing! We recently welcomed Jason Shen, our first sales dude / ‘Customer Scout’. And before that was Alicia Tang, our ‘Programming Samurai’.

Make $5,000 While Being A Good Friend

We’ve done the job boards and normal funnels. But we believe that the best people come through trusted networks. So today we’re announcing a new referral reward!

Do you know someone we’d fall in love with and who might love us back? We will pay you $5,000 cash for the introduction if it leads to your friend joining our family. Even if you find us directly and apply to join, pick your favorite friend and say they referred you

We’re not swimming in money, but we wanted the world to know we’re serious about building a world class team. In addition to the bounty, we’ll drop a truckload of good karma off right in your driveway.

(By the way, no contingency recruiters please. Spam = bad karma.)

Now We’re On The Hunt For A “Senior” Backend Web Developer!

Some of the basics:

• You love to build amazing web apps, have a passion for shipping product, and work well with other super people.
• You must have experience building web applications. Bonus points for SaaS apps or advertising products.
• Experience at a startup or similarly agile / fast paced company. You love the startup lifestyle.
• You are very good at what you do (we have very high technical standards).
• You are a well rounded backend web dev. That means template layer through sys admin and schema. But you don’t need to be a JS guru or server specialist.
• We primarily use PHP and the Symfony framework. Experience with either is not required – if you are an amazing Python dev who wants to switch to PHP, that’s fine.

You can see more about this opening and apply on www.isocket.com/jobs.

Happy hunting!

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.

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.