Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

I am Healy Jones, a former venture capitalist living in Boston currently trying to see if I can survive as an entrepreneur. I am the head of marketing for Boundless, a provider of free textbook alternatives. Marketing to college students is a lot of fun – they are mobile, digital natives and don’t put up with services that don’t quickly provide value. I am enjoying applying some of my touchless sales tactics to drive higher app engagement.

For several years I worked with Prasad at OfficeDrop, an online cloud storage company. I helped the company grow to be over 200,000 users, up from a few hundred when I joined the company. I’ve had a lot of success with marketing mobile apps, and have launched 3 apps in the top of their respective app marketplaces. This is partially why I blog so much about the mobile market – mobile and tablets are changing the way people interact with their data, and it is driving a lot of our growth.

In May of 2009 I left Atlas Venture, where I had focused on early stage investments in technology. Previously I was with Summit Partners in their Palo Alto office, where I spent a lot of time hunting down later stage venture investments in communications and internet service companies (I also evaluated a large building product company’s buyout.) Briefly I worked for a small, service business focused, buyout group in San Diego. There, I learned how profitable portable toilet servicing companies are, and also that you should not wear a new pair of shoes to such a company’s service site… I started my career during the dot.com boom in San Fransisco, where I worked for the technology investment banking group of Hambrecht & Quist. I enjoyed the bubble, and stuck it out all the way until the bust, surviving a couple of mergers and ending up with a JP Morgan business card.

Prasad, my co-blogger and the CEO of OfficeDrop, and I became friends at Wharton while we were getting our MBAs. We took a trip together to South East Asia and worked on building the Wharton Follies set. While I was busy trying to network into venture capital firms, Prasad was conceiving OfficeDrop and writing code.

Healy Jones Speaking

I’ve only recently realized that I should be keeping track of the places that I’ve been speaking! In general, I tend to talk about how to grow a lightly funded startup, lean startup techniques (OfficeDrop has had a few pivots to reach a point where we can actually offer something people want) and online/app marketing. A few of my recent talks are:

• Talk at Wharton – Lean Startups & MBAs
• Business Insider – How Lean Startups can Beat Big Companies
• SXSW – David vs. Goliath and How Startups Can Win

More Healy Jones Stuff

I enjoy cooking, the ocassional glass of wine (I was president of the Wharton Wine Club) and Boston’s pretty amazing sporting culture.

Besides the MBA from Wharton, I have an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth.

My employer, OfficeDrop, is not responsible for any of the posting on this blog. All of the items posted by me are my own personal opinion, and are not endorsed by OfficeDrop or any of my former employers.

You can reach me by email at: healy (at) the name of my blog.com. Obviously my blog’s name is startable.com…