Memorable Moments in Chicagoland Innovation

 

About This Series: The story of innovation in Chicago is best told through the experiences of accomplished local visionaries. All innovators are blessed with imagination, drive and at least a bit of serendipity. In this 10-part series, we will showcase how inspiration turns into execution and the creation of new systems. These stories are only the beginning.
 

Featured Chicago Innovator: Dick Costolo, CEO, FeedBurner

 

It’s fitting that FeedBurner’s pioneering business model became fully baked in during a meeting at the Klay Oven Restaurant.

 

Back in 2004, FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo and his partners anticipated a huge opportunity in the emerging Internet-based market of Real Simple Syndication (or RSS). Over lunch, they realized that rather than competing with scores of consumer-focused startups, FeedBurner would instead best succeed helping publishers summarize and distribute their information online.

 

“We were the only company doing that for years,” recalls Costolo.

 

FeedBurner would eventually manage syndication feeds for more than 500,000 publishers, bloggers and podcasters. Costolo attributes the company’s meteoric growth to “lots of deliberate steps forward with a couple quantum leaps in between.”

 

A morning brainstorm session helped to hatch the company’s second “quantum leap” of innovation and make FeedBurner its industry’s standard. As FeedBurner helped publishers attract new readers, the company encouraged its customers to broadcast their success by making new metrics publicly available in real time.

 

“The week after we launched this widget our service went up by an order of magnitude,” said Costolo, who added that FeedBurner went from adding 100 new publishers per day to more than 1,000.

 

FeedBurner, which was initially backed by Northfield-based venture capital firm DFJ Portage, in 2007 was sold to Google for a reported $100 million. A good portion of Google’s Chicago-based engineering staff is comprised of FeedBurner alumni. 

 

Check out other interesting innovators at the 2009 Innovation Summit on May 21.
 

 

 

The "Innovation in Chicago" series features interviews and work by Brad Spirrison. Brad is a local technology writer and media creator. Each week he authors the “Tech Matters” column in the Chicago Sun-Times. He can be reached at brad@chicago.com.