7.2. The Company
eTapestry's four cofounders had accumulated more than 30 years of experience developing solutions for the nonprofit sector. CEO Jay Love and COO Steve Rusche have each spent 15 years managing the operations of nonprofits, while CTO John Moore and Scott Ganyo, the vice president of research and application architecture, each have more than a dozen years with system design, database management, and programming. Prior to cofounding eTapestry, Moore and Ganyo had extensive object-oriented development experience working with C++ and SmallTalk. They began working with the Java language even before its 1995 public release.
The idea that eventually became eTapestry originated in the mid 1990s while the founders were principals of Master Software, a vendor that offered client/server-based business applications for charitable organizations. “We realized that the Internet was the coming wave,” says Rusche. “We had an R&D project on Web development underway at the time the company was sold to a competitor.”
After their company was sold, the four worked for different companies in the Indianapolis area. “We still got together in our off-hours to thrash around our ideas,” Rusche says, noting that thanks to their similar backgrounds in object-oriented design, Scott and John “were on the same page” when it came to developing the new architecture for the application.
Significantly, a major design goal was to offer the application as an application service provider (ASP), which at that time was an untested idea. “We knew the nonprofit world was populated with organizations that couldn't afford to buy or install their own software,” notes Rusche, who adds that the design goals of simplicity and low cost became their “mantras.” At their previous company, they had all learned that only a handful of nonprofit organizations had the resources to maintain IT staffs that could install and maintain the applications. According to eTapestry's Ganyo, in raw numbers, the nonprofit field is dominated by small organizations, most of which are run primarily by volunteers.
Nonetheless, because the ASP concept was so new, the cofounders hedged their bets. The new architecture would have to be modular and flexible enough to allow the application to be deployed either in conventional shrink-wrapped form or over the Internet as a service. It would be simpler to administer than conventional, Windows-based client/server applications because it would take advantage of the familiar, HTML Web-browser front end.
Today, eTapestry has become the first Web-based donor-management application for nonprofit organizations. It is also the first to offer this functionality through the ASP channel. After the end of its first year of operation, eTapestry.com has attracted a user base of 500 organizations; its ASP service handles an average of 50 concurrent sessions. And an independent customer poll, conducted by an outside market research organization, found eTapestry winning good or excellent ratings for its ease of use and prompt customer service.