I was asked to write a blog on why I decided to join Invodo.

First, a disclaimer: This is my first blog post. Yes, I am a blog newcomer. I asked for guidance on what I should write and the answer was that I should be heartfelt and authentic. That sounded pretty simple to me, as that is how I live my life. So, without further disclaimer, here goes…

Before I tell you why I decided to join Invodo, let me start by telling you what is not the reason. Some people jump jobs because they are running from something – perhaps an environment that they don’t like, a boss they don’t like, a declining business, or something similar. That is not the case with me. I was very happy and proud of my team. They were like family to me. Wayport had been through the trials of Job and had emerged as a powerhouse – the largest provider of managed Wi-Fi hotspots in the US. We were also doing challenging and interesting things and business is booming, connections on our infrastructure were growing at 4x/year. Those kind of challenging things excite me, and it was a difficult decision to leave. Even though things changed with the AT&T acquisition, I wasn’t actively looking to make a jump to another company.

So, why Invodo? My wife asked why I would leave a stable job with a great team, great compensation and benefits to join a startup. She’s my toughest critic, so I am well practiced at answering this question. There are several reasons:

1) Opportunity. When we started at Wayport over 10 years ago, hardly anyone knew what a Wi-Fi hotspot was, but I thought that over the next decade Wi-Fi would become huge. It did, and Wayport became the largest provider of managed hotspots even though it had many larger competitors to begin with. When I look out over the next decade, I believe that video will be huge in e-commerce. I expect that just about every site will have video. Invodo is unique in this space as we do full service.

2) Team. When I met the Invodo team, it reminded me of my early days at Wayport and Pavilion. We had world-class teams at those companies and I see the same thing at Invodo. They are talented, energetic, fun, and entrepreneurs at heart. They are full of the fire, desire, and vision from which great companies are built. The investor group is the same as the group that funded Wayport, and they have a knack for picking winners.

3) Impact. I liked AT&T, but there wasn’t much I could do personally to move the mother ship in one direction or another. In a small company, my efforts are often live-or-die decisions: We do the right things and make it big, or we do the wrong things and we fold. I thrive on sense of responsibility and the rewards that come with it. When I look back over Pavilion and Wayport, I was instrumental in helping create companies that provided jobs for nearly 1,000 people (around 200 at Pavilion and nearly 800 at AWS). I would like to do that kind of thing again – building world-class teams is what I love to do.

4) Technology platform. Invodo’s technology platform is just at the beginning of what it can become, but it already has all of the right pieces. I expect that we will be adding unique IP to this in the future that will make Invodo the most sought-after provider in this space.

5) Money. Ok. I am coin-operated. The most important reason that I came to Invodo is to get stock options and make them worth a pile of money. That opportunity did not exist at AT&T. It also can’t be done without reasons 1-4, and I found a place where we can make the company very valuable. That is good for everyone, me, the employees and their families, and the investor group.

Stay tuned. I think this will be an extremely fun and profitable ride.

– Jim Keeler