Photo by Eytonz

So why did I quit my job and start a business?

I’m convinced technology can help big companies execute far better than they do today. Every day when I was at Apple I could see ways to improve how I did my job, if only I had the right tools. The crux is communicating needs. I knew there were colleagues out there willing to share the expertise, resources or external contacts we needed, but there was no way to find them. Equally, I had no way of spotting situations outside our team where we could help.

Everyone there lived on email, almost every decision, statistic, question, answer, and connection was held on the mail server. That was exactly the data we all needed to do our jobs, but the only way we could interact with it was through a primitive client-side keyword search on whatever email we happened to have on our local machine. It felt like the web before Google, the information was out there but effectively dead, since we’d never be able to find it.

I’m building Mailana to solve the problems I ran into in my daily work. The technology’s out there to locate experts, contacts, and documents, once you can break into the antiquated silos that hold all the messages captive. It’s an itch I have to scratch.