Updated December 3, 2007

Erica with best friend Seth in 2006 (photo by Glenda)

My name is Erica and I live in San Jose, CA. I live in a 3BR duplex with my boyfriend, Richard, and two cats, Alexis and Katie. I moved here in 1999 from Indiana (where I grew up) to pursue my dream of being in the Internet industry. I’m currently “temporarily retired”, and recently sold my business, Simpli Hosting, to Silicon Valley Web Hosting.

The Internet has been my passion ever since I was first introduced to it so long ago. Computers didn’t do much for me until I got AOL back in 1994. (I know; AOL; shudder!) All of a sudden, I was spending every minute of free time in chat rooms, downloading music files (back then, it was all MIDI, MOD and S3M), and having a blast. I also racked up $100+ phone bills every month, which my allowance partially paid for.

I soon figured out I’d need a job to pay for my phone bills, so I dove headfirst into “work from home” opportunities. I eventually found a legitimate one — search engine submission. I was given a website, a custom frameset, and clicked a bunch of buttons to submit that website to search engines. My parents didn’t believe I had a job until the paychecks started rolling in. I was paid about $400 a month, which was great for a 14-year-old!

In 1996, we finally got a local ISP (a guy running a modem pool on a T1 in his garage; yes, I lived in a small town.) This opened the floodgates, and by 1998, I was running a large shareware site (TheBestShareware.com [now defunct]) and a web design company, ShakaDesign.com. I also hit the pavement once I was 16 and had a driver’s license, emailing my resume to local web design companies in Cincinnati, OH. One of them (Gaeanet Design) gave me a job, and I became their HTML guru for the summer for the handsome salary of $5.65 an hour.

Once I graduated high school in 1999, I packed my things and headed to California. I’d already secured a job here as a web marketing guru. The owner of the company was a bit disgruntled that I turned out to be an 18-year-old, so that job only lasted a month. While studying at San Jose State, I aggressively promoted my resume on Craigslist, and landed a part-time job at Cobalt Networks as a desktop support person, affectionately known as “the helpdesk.” I was one of the earlier employees at Cobalt and got to watch our IPO, which was definitely a day to remember. I loved the passion and people at Cobalt.

Cobalt went on to get bought out by Sun Microsystems in December 2000. Before the axe fell on some 70% of the Cobalt staff, I jumped into a position in the content management group for Sun.com. Working on a large website like Sun.com is a neat thing to have on your resume, but in reality, I didn’t like working there. I missed the “small company” atmosphere at Cobalt, and felt like nothing ever got done at Sun. I finally saw the chance to quit in April 2002, and ran headfirst into the realities of being a web developer for a living (hint: don’t do it!)

I went hand-to-mouth for a while, surviving on a few PHP programming projects. In July 2002, I got picked up by On The House Syndication to revamp the backend of their website, OnTheHouse.com. This was the break I needed. On The House hired me part-time as a contractor, giving me enough money to survive while I built up Simpli.

I started Simpli in 2001, and I had been colocating servers since 1998, but I hadn’t really put much effort into it. I was just hosting a few sites and making a couple hundred dollars a month, which, after colocation fees, was just enough to pay my cable modem bill. All of a sudden, On The House needed more disk space than their hosting provider could provide them (they were already on the largest plan their provider offered.) I asked if they’d like to host with Simpli. I had my first large customer, and Simpli was actually being taken seriously.

I started to really push Simpli when I got a $15,000 investment from my dad in September 2002. My grandmother had passed away, and my dad gave me the money he inherited from her. (My company is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother; without her, it wouldn’t be where it is today.) I used the money to buy servers — I told my parents that I would voluntarily bow out of the business if I couldn’t lease out 8 servers.

Erica with boyfriend Richard, doin’ what we do (hanging out with laptops), November 2007

Simpli started to take off in 2003, and that year, my revenues from Simpli almost matched what I was making at On The House (which surprised even me.) In April 2003, we moved to AboveNet, and that scored us a ton of new customers. (A 100% uptime guarantee does that, I suppose.) My business continued to grow, and in 2007, the buyout sharks started circling.

I reviewed three buyout offers in early 2007, finally deciding I wouldn’t sell for less than $1.1 million. All three of the companies still seemed eager to participate in buying my business, and I decided to sell to Silicon Valley Web Hosting. This proved to be a good fit, as SVWH took over our office and our space in the Market Post Tower datacenter in downtown San Jose. Simpli officially was no longer my company on September 7, 2007.

What’s next? Writing full-time and starting a new business in 2008. I already know what I want to do next, but I’m also interested in taking some time off and enjoying a life that is suddenly a lot less hectic.

-Erica