Geeks of the Week: Zak Boca & Dan Ushman
A number of months ago we launched a feature called Geek of the Week. Every week, CloudWedge nominates a ‘Geek of the week’ to any cloud leader who has been in the news in the last week that we feel deserves special mention or praise.
This week we are doing things a little differently. For the first time in CloudWedge history we are happy to announce this week we have two Geeks of the Week, Zak Boca CEO and Dan Ushman CMO at SingleHop. We mentioned Chicago based SingleHop earlier this week, in reference to their new wave of funding for their cloud venture LEAP.
We felt that Zak and Dan deserve this award, mainly because of the story of how SingleHop came about. It all started in 2003 when Zak and Dan founded midPhase, a shared hosting provider. As midPhase grew, they envisioned more for the company than it was capable of, and in 2006 created SingleHop to fill the void. SingleHop grew increasingly successful, and by 2008 they had generated around $3 million in revenue. By 2011, revenue soared to $22 million.
Dan and Zak actually first met each other in an AOL programming chat room when they were only 12 years old. According to the SingleHop site “In his off time, Zak can be found traveling and exploring the great outdoors with family and friends.” and “When he isn’t working, Dan can be found in his kitchen whipping up homemade BBQ sauce, or in front of the grill with a spatula putting that sauce to work.”
