About
Joe Lauer
Joe is an entrepreneur, technology hobbyist, open source contributor, and software engineering enthusiast. Interests include startups, mobile, big data, linux, android, iOS, java, scala, play framework, home automation, and running.
Joe was the Founder and CEO of Cloudhopper, where he lead the company from inception to profitability and acquisition by Twitter in 2010. At Twitter, Joe managed the mobile engineering and business development teams responsible for creating the client and infrastructure stack for one of the world's largest and most reliable notification platforms that handled trillions of transactions across a wide variety of mobile devices. Prior to Cloudhopper, Joe was Founder and COO of Simplewire, where he lead the company from concept through venture financing and acquisition by Qpass/Amdocs (NYSE: DOX) in 2006, where it was rebranded to OpenMarket. At OpenMarket, Joe was the Director of Operations and a key member of the management team, where he recruited and lead numerous groups as OpenMarket rapidly grew into one of Amdocs most profitable business units and #1 in its market. Joe holds a BSE in Computer Science from the University of Michigan College of Engineering in Ann Arbor.
Summary
- Founded two profitable companies with acquisitions to Qpass in 2006 and Twitter in 2010
- 15+ years of broad engineering and operational experience spanning mobile, payments, social media, big data, web, and front/backend platforms
- Built and managed large and small high performance organizations in both public and private companies
- Active open source software contributor and enthusiast
- Product and customer focused engineering that drove active user growth and retention
- Proven technology vision, strategy, and creativity
Patents
- System, method, and computer program product for payment authorization based on a variable payment authorization score (United States 8,086,533)
- System, method, and computer program for managing transaction billing across a plurality of billing sources utilizing an interface to configure advice-of-charge (United States 8,260,694)
- Distributed message queue with best consumer discovery and area preference (pending, United States 13/019,998)
Greenback.com
Founder and CEO (Aug 2015 - Current)
Greenback is bookkeeping on cruise control. Greenback automatically syncs original & itemized receipts from the companies you do business with. Exchanging emails, paper, or PDFs for invoices and expenses is cumbersome and error prone. While convenient for the sender, it's painful for the recipient. Greenback directly connects customers with vendors for a seamless electronic exchange of invoice and expense data. We include detailed line items, shipping, billing, and payment data with no manual data entry. Both parties win with a complete picture of the transaction.
Fizzed
Founder and CEO (May 2013 - Current)
Fizzed is a consulting firm that incubates the launch and growth of mobile, web, and data products. With an experienced team of entrepreneurs and engineers, Fizzed can bring your product vision to market or accelerate your existing development efforts. Leveraging its continuous investment in open source and private research, we are a leader in innovative product design and scalable engineering. Fizzed offers a unique approach to standard consulting by becoming an extension of your team, either through joint ventures or traditional relationships. We have a diverse blend of private, public, and government clients that span across a variety of industry verticals, software platforms and device types.
Engineering Manager, Mobile (Apr 2010 - May 2013)
Recruited and managed the Twitter mobile team responsible for creating both the client and infrastructure stack for one of the world's largest and most reliable notification platforms that handled hundreds of billions of transactions across a wide variety of devices. Left a unique legacy by engineering the only platform spanning all of Twitter to have 100% uptime (3.5 years and counting) during the most challenging years of Twitter's hyper growth. Responsibilities primarily included managing the engineering and operations teams that built and maintained the geographically distributed platform, as well as the business development team that established 260+ mobile operator relationships across 82 countries. Lead the development of numerous mobile product enhancements and features that became a significant driver of Twitter's overall active user growth and retention over the years.
Cloudhopper
Founder and CEO (Aug 2008 – Apr 2010)
Acquired by Twitter in April 2010. Cloudhopper engineered the software and operated the infrastructure (software as a service) to reliably scale and geographically distribute some of the world's highest volume mobile messaging programs. Lead the company from its inception to profitability to eventual acquisition. Managed all aspects of the business including engineering and product as well as sales and operations. Cloudhopper's unique intellectual property and meticulously engineered technology was strategically acquired by Twitter to replace their in-house platform. Cloudhopper's team formed the early nucleus of Twitter's mobile group. As part of Twitter, Cloudhopper's mobile platform not only scaled over the years for volume in the trillions, but was Twitter's most reliable as well - with zero downtime since its launch in 2009.
OpenMarket
Director, Operations/Connectivity (Feb 2006 – Aug 2008)
Simplewire was rebranded to OpenMarket and became a new business division of Qpass, which was acquired by Amdocs (NYSE: DOX) in May 2006. As a key member of the division's management team, recruited and lead numerous teams as OpenMarket rapidly grew into one of Amdocs most profitable business units. Responsibilities spanned engineering, operations, carrier relations, product, and support. The original concept, engineering, and intellectual property of Simplewire continues to thrive today as OpenMarket is now the #1 market leader in mobile messaging and payments in North America.
Simplewire
Founder and COO (Jan 2001 – Feb 2006)
Acquired by Qpass in February 2006. Founded well before SMS text messaging was mainstream , Simplewire was a visionary company that disrupted the traditional closed operator content model and sparked some of North America's most successful mobile content companies. Simplewire was one of the world's first providers of SMS text messaging and mobile payment services on behalf of hundreds of mobile operators around the world such as AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Vodafone, etc. Lead the company from concept through venture financing to profitability and eventually acquisition. Architected the intellectual property and managed all aspects of the business primarily focusing on engineering, operations, product, carrier relations, and support.
Rootlevel
Senior Software Engineer (Jun 1998 – Jan 2001)
Designed and engineered mission critical database and web applications for numerous Fortune 500 clients such as General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. Rootlevel was one of Michigan's leading firms that specialized in building Internet-based applications.
Patents
System, method, and computer program product for payment authorization based on a variable payment authorization score (United States 8,086,533; Issued December 27, 2011)
A system, method, and computer program product are provided for generating a variable payment authorization score. In use, a payment authorization request is received. In response, a variable payment authorization score is generated. Further, the variable payment authorization score is provided for use.
System, method, and computer program for managing transaction billing across a plurality of billing sources utilizing an interface to configure advice-of-charge (United States 8,260,694; Issued September 4, 2012)
A system, method, and computer program product are provided for managing transaction billing across a plurality of billing sources utilizing an interface. In use, information associated with a transaction is received. Additionally, billing of the transaction is managed utilizing an interface accessible to a plurality of billing sources. Further, a billing response is returned, based on the management of the billing of the transaction.
Distributed message queue with best consumer discovery and area preference (United States 13/019,998; Filed February 2, 2011)
The distributed message queue with best consumer discovery and area preference is a new process that creates one logical message queue from a queue that may be distributed across several different systems or even several different geographically dispersed data centers. Each system will automatically discover other systems that have “consumers” for a particular queue. A system will automatically distribute its messages to other systems that have active consumers, preferring systems within its own area (e.g. same data center).