Summary: I’m a technically-minded serial entrepreneur living in San Francisco and currently starting 3L Systems, a property management system startup. 3L is developing a next generation PMS to innovate hotel management. Previously I started Webmasters International, a service company that currently provides outsourced software development for several web startups.

Background: I was born with a keyboard in hand, writing games in Basic since age 7, coding MUDs in C and hacking anything I could in my teens. By high school graduation, I became fascinated with business and joined a boutique ad agency, The Bauhaus, initially as a developer, later as their CTO. As a Computer Science freshman at Georgia Tech, I tried to start an e-commerce gifts company, Sia Regali, with Tim Walters, owner of The Bauhaus. Sia Regali never got off the ground, but a passion for startups was lit deep in my soul.

In 2005, as a junior in college, I founded Webmasters International (WMI), a web design & application development company with an offshore subsidiary in Ukraine. Growing the company to about 40 employees and $150,000/month in revenues by mid-2007, we hit our first growing pains: the inevitable difficulties in scaling a service business. I moved the company from Atlanta to San Francisco, and began to transform WMI into a product development center.

Our first product was MoreSpots, a video advertising platform with a “spotted” history. The platform was initially developed by WMI for a client, but the relationship went sour when this client failed to close funding and defaulted on several hundred thousand in unpaid invoices. We negotiated an acquisition of the intellectual property as payment, and proceeded to prepare “MoreSpots” (a working name for the ad platform) for an open-source release. Our vision for the world’s first open source video advertising platform was cut short when we received a tempting buy-out offer at Ad:Tec NYC in November 2007, and completed the sale by February 2008. Although we never brought it to market, our first product was a minor financial success.

As of July 2008, WMI continues to develop core technologies for a handful of startups in both consumer and enterprise web app spaces with a small team of elite web hackers in our Ukraine office. My personal focus shifted in 2008 to my next startup, 3L Systems.

3L Systems was born when I met two other finalists at Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (the world’s highest honors for an undergraduate entrepreneur), Sean Maney and Tim Hamilton. Sean, based in Boston, is a serial entrepreneur that previously founded three highly successful software companies, HairMax Software (salon POS), SiBoom (world-leading salon & spa POS, and MazieWare (world-leading correctional juvenile justice software), as well as a successful beauty product company, Spa Siam. Tim, based in Austin, founded Astonish Designs, a web development company. Tim left the project early due to pressures from the overwhelming success of Astonish Designs. Instead two stellar developers based here in San Francisco joined as co-founders: Ivan Matyunin, previously the lead architect of our MoreSpots platform, and Peter Min, a visionary product fanatic.

3L Systems, a brainchild of Sean Maney, is bringing the same ease of use and power of management to the hospitality industry that Sean’s software brought to the beauty industry. Designed to better manage a hotel’s reservation, check-in/check-out, administrative, and accounting processes, 3L Systems is competing in the profitable, but competitive property management systems (PMS) space, a mature industry dominated by corporations such as MICROS, Agylysis, Soft Brands, HIS, and Maestro Systems. With the nimble agility and ungodly development speed of a Silicon Valley startup, we’re well on our way to replacing rust with robots and putting quality into property management software.