A few weeks ago I sat down with Gary Kendall, CEO of Limestone Networks while attending HostingCon 2008 in Chicago. I spoke to the CEOs of quite a few dedicated server providers, and this was conversation really stuck out.
All in all it was a good conversation. Limestone is a young, scrappy, service-oriented provider that appears to be going through hyper growth. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to nail down an idea of their scale. The other dedicated server firms were all more than happy to share some basic statistics about size and scale while spending a lot of time touting their technical prowess. Limestone was fairly guarded, and spent a lot of time talking about customer service. Maybe this is the new face of the hosting industry?
Here we go again!
How’s HostingCon treating you so far? Your booth seems to be pretty busy.
Gary Kendall: It’s good conference because you get partner connections, we’re interested in building partnerships and relationships with other companies.
Tell me more about Limestone. Give me your elevator pitch.
Gary Kendall: We’re a dedicated server hosting company. We sell unmanaged dedicated server customers. Our customers are people who sell vps, gaming servers, share hosting, any number of things. We want to make sure we have as many solutions sort of prepackaged for our customers.
We provide “Ping, Power, and Pipe”. We have VOIP providers who are leasing racks from us.
This is a huge, but crowded market. How do you distinguish yourself from the competition?
Gary Kendall: We want to be able to have add-on things like website creation tools for our customers to be able to resell. We want our customers to have a real easy solution that lets them build their business. We partnership with cpanel, people who do ssl and domain name services, etc.
Whatever we can do to make it easy for our customers we want our customers to be able to come in and start their businesses as seamlessly as possible and do their partner services. If we can bundle all that into a set of service offerings, we win and so do our customers.
Give me the 50,000 foot view. How long has the company been around? Where are you located? How many servers do you have currently?
Gary Kendall: Less than a year old. Inc. in August of 2007. Went live January 1st. We’re one of the fastest companies in the market space. We’re in Dallas at the infomart.
One of the big problems for large dedicated server providers is scaling private virtual lans for customers spread out over multiple racks or even states. How are you solving this?
Gary Kendall: Limestone private tunnel. It’s a private back-end network. Every server has dual network cards in them. Every customer has a private back-end network. That’s a huge selling point for us.
We know that Automation is the key to success or failure in our market. Tell me something about how far along you are with limestone’s infrastructure.
Gary Kendall: We have “RockWare” which is proprietary software that provides the whole back end, the whole customer interface, ticketing, etc. It’s a one-stop shop.. A great customer portal.
Gary Kendall: We’re outpacing all expectations of growth. We’re already working on building their second datacenter, hoping to move into that in the next few months.
Gary Kendall: I got tired of dealing with companies where you got crap, outsourced support from 6 different countries. I wanted a place where my customers could call and get local support by somebody who knows what they’re saying and cares about them and knows who they are. We’ll never offshore our support.
Our Mantra for the company is:
- Simple
- Solid
- Superior
Gary Kendall: I was a customer of a dedicated server provider a few years ago, and it was a byzantine process. With us it’s 3 questions to tell us what you need.
Gary Kendall: Network with 3 different carriers for our bandwidth. We’ve worked really hard at building our. My guys are fanatical in our support, and I often have to tell them to go home. Our employees are passionate about our customer support.
And I want people to come to a place where they know they’re loved and appreciated as customers.
Gary Kendall: Customer service, across the globe, is so abysmal today. If you offer just a smidgen of good customer support, you’ll have legions of customer support who will never leave you. We are very focused on quality customer support. We bend over backwards for our customers and err in the favor of their dispute. It’s an exciting business, we’re hiring weekly.
Has the debt market affected you at all?
Gary Kendall: We’re all private equity financing. They’re knocking on our doors to get let in. Datacenters are being filled before they open.
How many employees do you have?
Gary Kendall: Just under 20 at the time of this interview, and I have 7 openings right now.
Even today we’re in a tight labor market, good people are hard to find and harder to retain. How do you make and keep your employees happy?
Gary Kendall: We have a unique interview process. Several people interview them. My one question for them when I interview is what are you passionate about. If you’re not passionate about customer support and what we’re doing, then this isn’t the right place for you.
Gary Kendall: I am the CEO and the CVO, the Chief Vision Officer. My role is to run the company as the CEO but I don’t like that company. I don’t like that title, I don’t like corporate bureaucracy. Dilbert is my management hero.
I was determined to build a company that was fun to work at where people participate. I delegate and I say “this is where I want to go let’s get us there”.
My three hero companies are Google, Southwest Airlines and Apple.
Apple because Apple makes easy to use, intuitive products. If you ever walk into an apple store the customer service will knock you over, and I wnat my guys to be like that.
SouthWest Airlines. Those people love working at that company. When you talk to them they love working at their jobs. That’s their byline, “A fun airline to fly”. At Christmas they have jingles for the “please fasten your seat belt” stuff.
Fun is encouraged, I reward people who are goofy in their shift log out tickets.
And the last one is Google. Google encourages their employees to work on the projects they’re interested in. If you don’t allow people to explore their creative side you’re going to lose people. I give a lot of loose reign to the people who work with me and they do not disappoint me.
I hate it when people come and micromanage you.
Has that worked out for you in terms of skunkworks projects?
Gary Kendall: Absolutely. We have an R&D department. I give those guys a lot of leeway and they came up with RockWare and a lot of great new features for it. I encourage that, and it definitely does pay off. We definitely have one of the most robust APIs in the marketplace.
When I say cloud, what comes to mind?
Gary Kendall: Well Cloud Computing is the new buzzword, basically on-demand services. It’s basically clustered computed pre-loaded with what they need. We’re not out there pushing cloud computing at this point because it’s so nebulous and poorly defined. We’re driven by our customers. If our customers come to us and tell us they want this, we’ll build it. Even with our software, when our customers ask us to add this feature to our software, we’ll build that within days.
