I met 7foot 2in (kidding.. he’s only 6′10 or somthin)  Sean Tierney 3-4 years ago at a local meetup.  Over the years he has impressed me with his big ideas, networking ability, real life guitar skillz, and all around awesome.  Besides that fluff, he has managed to take his Tempe based virtualization startup, jumpbox.com, through two angel/seed investment rounds and just bagged a deal with one of the biggest blogging software suppliers on the planet. He agreed under protest to answer a few questions for us.

Q: Who is Sean Tierney?

I don’t do well with existential questions, I’m just the guy responding to your interview.

Q: Tell us how you got started with Jumpbox.

Kimbro is my business partner and JumpBox is really his brainchild-
I’ve just tried to support it as much as possible. He and I had met
randomly back in 2005 via a posting that I made to the AZIPA listserv
soliciting people for sharing office space. We had heard of each other
having worked at two of the same startups previously but had never
met. I was tired of contracting out of the house and wanted to get out
and work in proximity with bright developers and designers to get some
ideas and energy flowing (basically I wanted a Gangplank work space
before it existed). We ended up sharing an office together and over
the course of lunch conversations put this incubator concept together
that we called “Grid7.”  It was an experiment more than anything and
the idea was that we would recruit smart, entrepreneurial-minded
people of different backgrounds to get together each weekend and work
towards producing a set of passive revenue-generating side projects.

Long story short, we brainstormed a ton and spent a few frustrating
months trying to make them go but none of these ideas panned out. We
were each doing independent consulting at the time to pay bills and
this incubator concept was to be the forward-looking play but the
consulting work was draining and spending our weekends on these side
projects was burning us out. We were about to dissolve everything and
go back and take desk jobs but we had this one idea that kept coming
back and nagging us.  It was too involved to work as a Grid7 project
but we thought it had real potential if we were to treat it as a
traditional company.  I had recently taken out an equity line of
credit against my home in order to buy some property in Mexico.  That
deal had fallen through the week before so I had access to some money.
We basically arrived at a point where we said “Are we gonna do this?”
We both believed strongly enough in the opportunity and ultimately
decided that we’d regret it forever if we didn’t give it a try.

Q: How is Jumpbox changing the space?

Well the space is server software and we’re taking something that’s
historically been perceived as a very high-dollar, highly-technical,
monolithic, heavy thing and making light, portable and accessible to
anyone.  Open Source server applications have this “beastly”
stereotype to them and we’re taming that lion and making it a
domesticated house cat that anyone can have.

Q: What’s your philosophy for growing your business.

We make stuff we find useful ourselves, release it, listen and then
iterate based on what we hear.  There’s this interesting interplay
that’s a lot like sailing in that you have these market under currents
that are moving in one direction and simultaneously you have the winds
of technology shifting above you and you have to just pick a sensible
course and sail for awhile but then be ready to re-evaluate where
you’re at, how your boat has changed and what the wind and the
currents are doing. Pick a new course that gets you closer to the
island you want to be on and go again.

Growing a startup business to profitability is the ultimate challenge IMHO - it makes Everest look like a gopher hill.

Q: Some people consider Phoenix rough territory for technology startups,what do you say about that?

It’s got its advantages and disadvantages like anything.  Finding
startup-minded talent in Arizona has been a big challenge. It’s neat
to see pockets of people gravitating to an oasis like Gangplank but
the reality is we live in a desert when it comes to startups.  I did a
30-day roadtrip to the Bay Area last holiday season and achieved more
in that month networking-wise than I had in the 2 years prior in AZ.
At the same time, here we’re a bigger fish in a smaller pond in that
we’re one of maybe ten startups you can work for in AZ so we stand out
a lot more.  We have deeper ties here (both Kimbro and I are natives).
And plus we don’t have to sell plasma to afford the rent like we
would in the Bay.

Q: What can the Phoenix startup community do to help future businesses get going?

This is a great question because there is a mix of things that need to
occur for it to work.  Events like Startup Weekend, Supper Happy Dev
House and Gangplank’s hack nights are a good start.  We need founders
from past successful ventures to step up and be mentors to the people
who are hungry and out there tying to make things happen with a
startup of their own.  We need an “underground railroad” through the
Bay Area - a string of AZ-empathizer startup-friendly hostels that
will put people up for a few days and make introductions.  We need
everyone to meet and interface through Francine Hardaway (wait that
may have already happened ;-). We need the Angel groups to come down
off their high horses, realize they’re not investing in real estate
and start feeding smaller funding into projects coming out of the
local incubators like Gangplank. I just got back from the grand
opening of Club E’s eFactory up in N. Phoenix tonight and that setup
looks promising. We need more of these co-work spaces where
entrepreneurs can have easy access to legal, accounting, engineering,
finance, etc under one roof. We need supportive legislation and tax
incentives - the AZ Angel Tax Credit thing was a complete joke from
our perspective. But ultimately we need people who have a passion to
dare to ditch the 9-to-5 and work to make important ideas happen.

Q: Give me some names of other awesome local cats you think we should talkto.

honestly my brain is fried right now - go to any of the events listed
here and you’ll find the people you want to meet->
http://www.meetupstogoto.com/

Q: Why are you such a fuckin loser?

ahem, don’t make me print another boarding pass for you ->
http://flickr.com/photos/obuweb/2316883192/

<this is an ongoing joke between Sean and I>

Q: What can we expect to see from Jumpbox next?

We obviously can’t telegraph our next move but I can say this: think
about how Gutenberg must have felt the morning after he invented the
printing press?  The entire book publishing industry became possible
overnight. We’re looking at JumpBox as enabling possibilities of the
same magnitude in terms of how much this technology changes the
software publishing game both for consumers as well as producers. Stay
tuned.

Q: Any other nuggets of wisdom you want to share?

Don’t eat yellow snow.

Words to live by for sure, there you have it.. Thanks Sean.

Tags: jumpbox, startups, tempe