Burning Door was myself and three other colleagues who've created, nurtured (and in some cases, survived) various Internet startups in Chicago. We did webapp design and architecture consulting as BD in between our startup drives.

Spyonit was a web service offering a catalog of alerts to the general public, covering everything from eBay auctions to breaking business and news headlines to a “Vanity Spy,” which could tell you when your name appeared anew at the major search engines. Named one of the "Top 50 Most Useful Sites" on the web by Yahoo! Magazine, July 2000 and acquiring a base of over 100,000 users, Spyonit was acquired by 724 Solutions in September 2000.

As one of four founding Spyonit partners, I was responsible for:

• Conceiving and implementing the site’s interaction and visual design
• Communicating with end users daily to seek improvement feedback for every aspect of the service
• Collaborating with customers and Spyonit enthusiasts to define web-based tools to extend Spyonit’s alerting capabilities

My efforts directly contributed to our acquisition and realized bankable ROI for our angel investor corps in less than one year.

Brought what I learned about usability at Microsoft to a new team within Andersen that was attempting radically rethink how the firm built its solutions from a much more modular and reusable process and architecture. This rethink included much more focus on user experience; the best part was that I met my co-founders for three startups to follow among the like minds there.