Hello, everyone. My guest today is Bill Babel. He's a CEO and founder of a company called Pingboard, which provides live org charts and planning software to thousands of companies. Before Pingboard, Bill was CTO and co-founder of a company called Webmail, the largest B2B email provider before Gmail. After Webmail was acquired by Rackspace, Bill co-founded Capital Factory in Austin, Texas to help entrepreneurs get off the ground and build great companies.

Bill, are you ready to take us to the top?

I'm ready.

All right, so we're obviously friends, but I also always like when I go to New York and I walk in, you know, CAA's office or someone's office and it says, you know, type your name in and check

in and tell the person you're here to visit that you're ready. And it says, you know, power by

pingboard across the bottom. So tell us about the company and how you make money. So that was

actually one of our really early product that we've since killed. I don't know if you know that.

So our product today is org chart software for businesses.

And we didn't start there.

We kind of iterated to that over the course of the first two years of the business.

So we basically sell software that helps companies build org charts and hiring plans.

And it's something that pretty much every company in the world needs to do.

So that first kind of interaction I had with the products, something that pretty much every company in the world needs to do.

So that first kind of interaction I had with the product,

it was in the form of really, honestly, it was hardware.

There was obviously software powering the org chart behind it.

But did you, why did you start there from iteration perspective?

Did you pay for the hardware to get, just get it installed and get in offices?

And then why did you kill it?

So we built that initially actually out of a need we had at capital factory. We needed basically a member directory and something sitting at the front door so that a visitor could

browse or search the directory and ping the person they were there to see.

That's basically how the name came about, too, ping board.

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