Success comes from a company’s roots.
The advancement of technology over the past two decades is both astounding and inspiring. The majority of tools I use in my day-to-day life were both invented and adopted en masse in only a decade or so. Facial recognition software. Autonomous vehicles. Electronic trading. Mobile banking. The list goes on and on, and it’s shifting from serving only the general public to serving niche industries and enterprises. Take for example an area I know well, fintech, or technology that supports financial services.
Prior to Workstorm, I founded a technology-based trading firm called Chopper Trading. In just over a decade, the firm grew from start-up to 250 employees, with a foundation of enterprise fintech all built in-house. Thanks to an incredibly talented and dedicated team, we built complicated financial trading systems, quantitative engines, risk management and monitoring systems. This enterprise-grade software required extreme safeguards. Everything we did at Chopper had national security implications, as we were tied to every major financial exchange in the country. As the team liked to say, we were locked down like Fort Knox. We had to be.
In 2015, Chopper Trading sold to industry-leader DRW, and I started brainstorming our next venture. The high productivity, critical thinking and collaborative nature of the team at Chopper built world-leading financial technology in a secure digital environment. What if we could bring that same secure, collaborative environment to enterprises around the world? Imagine how much more productive businesses could be, in all shapes and forms, including highly regulated and confidential industries such as finance, law and professional services. By tapping into key learning from fintech, we could transform collaboration tech from an unsecure, casual chat software to a highly encrypted messaging, email, video and file sharing software built for global business.
After whiteboarding for months, we began bringing in engineers to build this concept into reality. Development was intentional and methodical, putting every safeguard in place and ensuring our enterprise-grade encryption held up to the most stringent industry standards. In the summer of 2018, only after we were confident in the security of our technology, we launched Workstorm, a secure collaboration platform built by professionals for professionals.
The future of Workstorm is guided by principle.
The team at Workstorm is unlike any other in the enterprise collaboration space. Like myself, much of our leadership team originated from the financial or legal industries, where information transfer is highly regulated. We have a deep appreciation for the importance of the data we are hosting and the impact it could have on a business.
But perhaps more important than our background is our beliefs. At Workstorm, we believe in preserving the privacy and control of our customers’ data. It’s not for sale, and it never will be. We hold firm that we will never allow our principles to be marginalized for profitability. It’s this belief system that I know will take collaboration tech from business-beneficial to business-critical within the decade, and I’m thrilled to be along for the ride.
