Exciting Changes At ActiveRain

Our founder and current CEO Jonathan Washburn is moving out of a day-to-day operating role with ActiveRain to focus on his new start-up called DailyTicket. Jon will continue to be actively involved with ActiveRain as an advisor, product champion and significant shareholder in ActiveRain. You can read his thoughts here.

These are mine, having been here with him for the entire ride.......

Jon has been critical to the growth and success of ActiveRain. (That's the company line.......what that really means is his fingerprints are all over this community.)

I can still remember sending out that first batch of invitations to the agents at our real estate company in May of 2006.  It was with baited breath that we watched as a few people signed up each day in the beginning. Five years later we have over 200,000 members and we still relish the chance to have an impact in each new members life and business.

Once people started joining, and they had the ability to blog, we started obsessing over how much traffic we could get to the site. I can remember wondering when we would hit 100 visitors in a single day, then when we would hit 1000. Today we have over 2.5 million people visiting ActiveRain every month......we've come a long way baby, but we're in no way at our goal.

Every step of the way, Jonathan was there to remind me, and us, that "If each of us 'wow' one member every day, we will build a successful business." We didn't even have a revenue model yet!! (how the heck would we pay for this thing?).......but he knew that if we treated our members in a way that showed them we cared, our community would find a place in the industry.

ActiveRain has wildly surpassed our early expectations.  ActiveRain is built upon caring, sharing, and genuine concern for one another. These are traits that Jon instilled in each of us as employees and we see those same traits shared in our community at large, even through our growth. His leadership has been inspiring in so many ways (not to mention his friendship).

I always knew that Jon would turn over the reigns at some point. It's with a heavy heart that we watch him dive head first into his next venture. The guy is a serial entrepeneur (not to be confused with Captain Crunch, he would be a cereal entrepreneur), it's in his DNA to start a new company.

Of course, we wish Jon well in his new venture. While we will miss the day to day interactions with him, his vision for the success of ActiveRain will remain in good hands.

(Speaking of good hands........)

We have been able to attract a new CEO, Nikesh (Niki) Parekh. Niki's experience with scaling technology businesses is a perfect fit for our company at a time where we hope to continue expanding on the foundation that makes ActiveRain great. Niki has worked with ActiveRain in the past serving as a consultant with ActiveRain in 2008 and then again earlier this year in 2011.

His fresh viewpoint is exciting for those of us who have seen our company and our community have such consistent growth the last five years.   Our company will remain dedicated to providing outstanding service to our members and providing a platform to enhance your real estate business.  As always, we look forward to hear any ideas that will help us better serve the needs of our members.

Jon will continue to work closely with Niki in the near future and longer term. Jon will also continue to post here on ActiveRain on his adventures in real estate, the Internet, and with DailyTicket.

~ Bob