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 think it’s an appropriate time to use one of my favorite sayings: “We’re as happy as a clam” to share that Mashable, one of the leading social media and tech news sources, just opened up their self-service ad sales on isocket!

If you’re into the world of social media and you haven’t somehow heard of Mashable then you’ve probably been living under a rock that’s hidden in a barn that’s stuck in a cave in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, they’re that awesome. The great team of people at Mashable are growing and doing big things.

Want to reach 13 million tech savvy visitors? Check out the run of site ad packages on Mashable’s advertising sales page.

Their inventory includes run of site ad zones of the 728×90 leaderboard, 300×250 medium rectangle, and 160×600 wide skycraper varieties. You can also sponsor the 300×250 med rec in their RSS feed to reach half a million subscribers.

We just made some tweaks to how you place a CPM ad order when adding it to your cart, why not give it a test run with an order?

With Mashable, TechCrunch, some exciting new publishers about to be announced soon, and our other great tech/startup blogs – BuyAds.com is the best place anywhere to reach these premium targeted audiences.

More to come

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.

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!

On a recent Friday afternoon, I was heads down in work when a group of a dozen or so young Asians walked in the office unannounced. It turned into a three hour chat about the meaning of entrepreneurship and life.

I felt like sharing my excitement about this chat and our new friends with you – along with a call to action.

This group of college students from Singapore took the time and money out of their own pockets to visit Silicon Valley. All but one or two had never been to the States.

Why? Like an aspiring young actress asking her parents to spend Spring Break in Hollywood just to soak it in, they sat in Singapore dreaming of the entrepreneurial lifestyle and what Silicon Valley might be like.

We talked about a lot in the three hours. But to sum it all up:

Be Young, Do Stupid

Earlier this year I spoke at the Teens In Tech conference about the challenges of being a young entrepreneur. I started pretty young, so I’ve made a ton of mistakes and faced a lot of age-related challenges.

My main advice to the very young crowd: “Be young, do stupid”. Don’t be afraid to get after it – vision is not constrained by the walls others build around you.

Skip to 2:10 to see a quick interview about a young teen who approached me about starting an airline:

Teens In Tech Conference 2010 from ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo.

Be Smart Enough To Know When You Are Lucky

If you’re like our new friends from Singapore – or like me back in school, reading everything about startups and technology you can find and dreaming of that life – don’t give up or settle for some safe  job just because it’s the decision your “civilian” friends will understand.

For those of us lucky enough to be working for a startup, who are pursuing their entrepreneurial dream, or even just geeking out in Silicon Valley with fellow nerds – take a moment to appreciate the awesomeness of these opportunities and the kind of life you lead.

This life can be really hard – but if you’re anything like us, it’s also incredibly rewarding and you can’t picture it being any different. If you’re living this life – don’t forget where you came from, and do what you can to help those who think you’re the lucky one.

The isocket crew tries to do what we can. For example, our doors are open for our entrepreneurial friends to use a desk / wifi, and we enjoy their company.

Yesterday at the AngelConf gathering at Y Combinator in Mountain View, mega angel investor Ron Conway said that he hopes any entrepreneur who has the guts to start a company gets funded. But you can contribute in ways without money, too.

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.

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.

A couple of weeks ago, hot on the heels of the trolololo meme, Al realized that listening to the song while he was working actually increased his productivity exponentially. Of course, he didn’t want everyone to know about his secret to achieving his incredible increase in Internet working capacity, so we were forced to record him when he wasn’t paying attention.

Here’s the video that we ended up getting of him giving away his secret — feel free to use this method yourself, just be ready to never get this song out of your head. Never.

Last Friday we were all hanging out here in the office and at some point Frank jumped up on one of tables and started playing with a random, rolled-up ball of paper towel (he plays with random stuff a lot). As he was chasing it all over the table I started to wonder if he would actually jump off of the table onto our huge bean bag chair, which was sitting below the table on the floor. After a couple of tries, I found that Frank would jump off of the table into the bean bag, but only as long as it was right below the table. He wasn’t about to go for any type of distance — well, not without the right type of motivation.

This got me and the rest of the isocket team wondering what would motivate Frank to jump just a little bit farther to reach the bean bag chair, so we pulled out some tasty human food (Teddy Grahams) and ran an experiment to see just how far the little guy would go to get his hands on some tasty treats. What followed was a hilarious moment in isocket office history, which of course we got on video. Check out the official Frank Experiment video below and let us know what you think of his jumping skills.

Also, side note — after seeing Frank jump into the bean bag chair, all I could think about were the sound effects used in the Knight Rider TV show whenever KITT’s turbo boost was used. Watch the video and you’ll see what I mean.

Here’s what it sounded like when KITT would hit the turbo boost: