Founders League is fortunate to have SendGrid as a member of
our awesome co-working community. For those who have been
living under a rock, SendGrid is a cloud-based email service
that delivers email on behalf of companies to increase
deliverability and improve customer communications. The company
also offers a scalable email infrastructure, provides metrics
on outgoing email, and handles the time consuming tasks
involved with implementing unsubscribe links, abiding by
anti-spam regulations, and maintaining corporate branding.
Having grown from a startup accelerator model itself, SendGrid
feels it important to stay close to their roots, startups, and
remain a part of this ecosystem. Additionally, SendGrid tries
to give back as much as they can to help others in the same
fashion they were helped early on.
We spoke to Mike Rowan, VP of Research & Development for SendGrid and head of SendGrid Labs about the company and why Providence is a great place for startups and small businesses:
Why did you locate your team in Providence?
MR: I'm born and bred in RI, and had started a couple companies here in the mid-late 90's. But, the lack of high tech talent and investor pressure pushed me to work on two other startups in the Boston area. I loved those startups, but I would have loved them to be based in Providence. With organizations like Betaspring and Founders League catalyzing Rhode Island entrepreneurship, the RI ecosystem is better situated than ever before to accommodate the needs of entrepreneurs.
What do you like about being a part of Founders League?
MR: In my role at SendGrid, my team and I develop products and services geared to help developers be more productive so they can focus on their core business. Being a member of the Founders League, in a community of startups, allows us to stay close to our roots and engage with developers and entrepreneurs firsthand. Being in the Founders League provides a close-knit community, communication with other entrepreneurs and peers, and a powerful feedback mechanism that helps us to build services that let our customers be more productive and focused. At a macro level, the Founders League is doing a great job of uniting the unique diversity of the Rhode Island startup community.
What are some cool projects you are working on?
MR: I run an internal effort at SendGrid called SendGrid Labs, which builds tools and services to help engineers and developers focus on their core business. We identify areas that are consistently distracting to engineering organizations and spin these out as individual services, doing all the heavy lifting for them and building for scalability. One of these tools is loader.io, a free load testing service that allows users to stress test their web apps or APIs with thousands of concurrent connections. We launched it 6 weeks ago and have already run over 400 million connections.
Check out SendGrid at:sendgrid.com
SendGrid Labs:labs.sendgrid.com
Loader.io:loader.io