Who, me?

Michael Fountain

Hello and thanks for stopping by! That’s me to the left, Michael Fountain. If I’m not the Michael Fountain you’re looking for, sorry about that. Give Google Image Search a try.

So, is it just me or are these “about me” pages hard to write? I’m more of a coder, not an author, so bear with me…here we go…

In the mid-90′s I was waiting my way through college and somehow ended up in restaurant management. Don’t ask why. It’s a long story, but it only took a few years of 60-hour work weeks to send me back to college.

While in college, for the second time, I met my future business partner and we started a web hosting company for restaurants. (Hey, It’s what we knew at the time. Cut us some slack.) Our goal was to web-enable the menus of all of our favorite local restaurants. Keep in mind that this was back in 1999 when AOL dial-up ruled the land. So, as you can imagine, this was not an easy sell trying to convince old-school restaurant owners that the web was their future. LOL. We were marginally successful then and managed to sign-up about 50 restaurants. The technology we used back then was PHP2 and flat-file databases. Woohoo!!

Needless to say, 50 restaurants was not going to pay all of our bills and with student loans, those bills were mounting. So we both graduated in 2000 and went to work for Corporate America, sort of.

Amazon.com

I ended up landing a job as a developer in Seattle working for Amazon.com. The web was still young and Amazon was still finding its way, re-org after re-org after re-org. The motto back then was “work hard, have fun, make history”, and I think I did plenty of each during my stay.

My business partner and I kept in touch and continued to manually bill our restaurants each month, month after month. It actually became a hassle to do each month because it was sooooo manual. You ever get those moments like; “There’s got to be a better way!” … Well long story short, ModernBill was born. I left Amazon.com around 2002 to pursue our new software venture, ModernGigabyte, full-time. (The name “ModernGigabyte” was born by throwing technology magnets on the refrigerator door. True story. I think of all of the “good” names we could have registered back then….oh well. )

ModernGigabyte

From 2002 to 2008, we grew ModernGigabyte from literally 2 guys in a basement to about 20 employees mostly located in our Louisville office. We serviced well over 15,000 diverse businesses in 100+ countries and by our calculations, processed billing for well over 1 million end-users each month! Our flagship product, ModernBill, automated the web hosting and ISP industry and to this day, very few if any web hosts provision accounts manually any more. That is soooo old-school!

Ernst & Young

In the meantime, my business partner and I were Finalists for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Award in 2006.

In 2007 we spun off one of our side projects and built a new automation product, DNZOOM, specifically designed for the domain name industry which we understood equally as well.

And In 2008, ModernGigabyte was acquired by Parallels, Inc. and DNZOOM was acquired by Bido, LLC. What a crazy year that was!

Since then, I’ve been running GOTPHP, INC., which is my technical consulting company. I focus primarily on helping my clients turn their ideas into products, a.k.a “productizing their ideas”.

Well, that’s it for now. Thanks for listening.

~ Michael