Company

Deloitte & Touche: FastSpring Ranked the #1 Fastest-Growing Company in the Greater Los Angeles Area and #13 in North America

FastSpring offers an innovative e-commerce engine designed to overcome ease of use, customer service, and cost issues that have plagued software e-commerce companies. We employ a customer-driven, iterative and collaborative development process.

FastSpring's Mission

To offer a highly customizable, flexible e-commerce solution focused on adding value and increasing revenue for clients, while providing the best customer service in the industry.

Company Origins & Success

FastSpring was founded in 2005 as a partnership of industry veterans with over 40 years experience in the e-commerce software industry, with a vision of bypassing legacy systems, addressing e-commerce customer dissatisfaction and building a robust e-commerce engine with the latest database, transactional and marketing technologies.

Members of the FastSpring team pioneered key segments of previous-generation e-commerce systems, and joined forces to build the next generation system—FastSpring.

FastSpring serves over 2,200 clients worldwide. The company has been profitable since 2009. A leading e-commerce service for the general software industry, FastSpring is also the number one e-commerce service for Mac software publishers.

FastSpring was ranked 53 in Inc. Magazine's Inc 500 list of fastest-growing companies in the US for 2011 and the #1 fastest-growing company on California's Central Coast by the Pacific Coast Business Times. In 2010, FastSpring was listed #41 and #2 in these rankings, respectively. In addition, Deloitte & Touche ranked FastSpring the #1 fastest-growing company in the Greater Los Angeles area and #13 in North America (U.S. and Canada), in its 2011 Technology Fast 500™ awards.

Executive Team

Tom Tzakis, CEO

Prior to joining FastSpring, Tom was a co-founder and Managing Partner of Pylon Capital, an entrepreneurial investment firm focused on investing in high growth, technology-enabled service companies. Along the way, he has worked with several start-ups and middle market companies to enhance the service offerings that drive customer satisfaction. Tom was a founding partner of PulSentry, a medical device start-up that develops life-saving patient monitoring systems.

Prior to these entrepreneurial ventures, Tom spent seven years as an investment banker, completing over 50 senior managed transactions in both the public and private markets. Tom received his BBA from the University of Wisconsin, where he was a member of the men's varsity golf team and an Athletic Board Scholar. He earned his MBA with honors from the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.

Chris Lueck, President

Prior to joining FastSpring, Chris was a co-founder and Managing Partner of Pylon Capital, an entrepreneurial investment firm focused on investing in high growth, technology-enabled service companies. Chris previously managed product development for Nyko Technologies®, the leading video game accessory company in North America. Before Nyko, he was a product engineer at Qualcomm®, where he worked on the development of mobile communications chips, including the world's first 3G communications chip.

Chris holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia, and an MBA with honors from the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, where he was a Leadership and Academic Scholar.

Dan Engel, Co-Founder & SVP Marketing

Dan specializes in the marketing and distribution of software products. Prior to being named SVP, Marketing in April, 2013, Dan was FastSpring’s CEO from 2005-2013. Prior to co-founding FastSpring in 2005, he was with Google™, where he led online consumer acquisition for Google's multi-billion dollar products, AdSense™ and AdWords™. Before Google, Dan was VP of Market Development at Picasa™, a digital photo software company acquired by Google in 2004. Dan led Picasa's online marketing, sales, and business development initiatives, growing revenue by 7X. Today Picasa is a leading online photo destination with over 7 billion photos uploaded (exceeding Flickr) and 50 million unique monthly visitors.

Prior to Picasa, Dan marketed GoToMyPC® and GoToMeeting® software, generating over $25 million in revenue over 18 months, helping lead to a $225 million acquisition by Citrix Systems in 2003, and building what is today a leading online consumer brand. With profits of over $250 million annually, it has become one of a handful of web-based software companies that is worth more than $1 billion today. At 24, Dan was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Idealab. Dan graduated from Tulane University with a BS in Management and a concentration in Finance. He is a member of YPO, a global organization for CEOs.

Ken White, Co-Founder & SVP Customer Service

Ken is a entrepreneur who has been involved with a series of successful software ventures. In 1999, his popular EarthTuner Internet Radio software product was acquired by CMGI. As an early investor and member of the founding team at RegSoft®, Ken was Manager of Operations and Business Development where he helped build an e-commerce platform which sold over 5,000 software titles and guided RegSoft through its acquisition by Digital River®. At Digital River, Ken helped design an affiliate sales system for multiple e-commerce platforms. Ken is the Co-Founder of NextUp, producers of popular text-to-speech software products. He received a BS in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State.

Ryan Dewell, Co-Founder & SVP Software Development

Prior to FastSpring, Ryan developed the RegNow® platform, an innovative digital product focused e-commerce system. As system architect and business developer from 1997-2003, Ryan designed and developed one of the first affiliate systems completely integrated with an e-commerce platform. After introduction of the affiliate program in 2000, its success quickly grew to 30% of RegNow's overall business revenue. At the end of 2003, the RegNow platform was running roughly 6,000 active clients (vendors and their affiliates) and today is known as OneNetwork.

Jason Foodman, Co-Founder & SVP Corporate Development

Jason is a highly-accomplished software entrepreneur, having founded numerous software and e-commerce firms including SwiftCD®, Trexar Technologies (Sold to Allume, then called "Aladdin Systems," now Smith Micro), MacRadio, Rebate Delivery, and others. Jason has been in the software and e-commerce industries for over 20 years, and has been an early investor and advisor to various tech start-ups, including NextUp, RegSoft®, PetDoc, and BroadTexter.

As Founder and CEO of SwiftCD between 1999-2008, Jason introduced the notion of Backup CDs to the mainstream software industry before selling the company. He built SwiftCD into the largest Backup CD service in the software industry with over 2,500 software clients.

Jason has filed numerous patents, published various articles on software e-commerce, and has been featured in numerous publications, including Fortune, Entrepreneur Magazine and Newsweek. He received a BS in Computer Science from Appalachian State as well as an MS in Computer Science from the University Of North Carolina. In his free time, Jason is an avid boater and 50-ton Master Coast Guard Captain.

Tim Dir, Vice President Finance

Tim manages FastSpring's financial operations. As VP of Operations for Physicians Weekly from 1997 through 2002, Tim created and ran the company's financial database system, placed TV advertising, set budgets and managed the sales force. In 1996, Tim started an e-commerce store, ran it for five years, and successfully sold the business. Tim has managed financial operations for various companies, including most recently for the Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce. Tim earned a BA degree in Business Administration from SF State University in 1995.

RegNow® and RegSoft® are registered trademarks of Digital River, Inc. Google™, Picasa™, AdSense™ and Adwords™ are registered trademarks of Google, Inc. GoToMyPC® and GoToMeeting® are registered trademarks of Citrix Online. SwiftCD is a registered trademark of DigitalSwift Corp. Deloitte® and Technology Fast 500™ are registered trademark of Deloitte & Touche LLP. Nyko® is a registered trademark of Nyko Technologies, Inc. Qualcomm® is a registered trademark of Qualcomm, Inc.