Born in England, Craig Ulliott now calls Chicago home and believes that "there has never been more opportunity here." Craig got his start by launching the Where I've Been app for Facebook (which was acquired by TripAdvisor.)
Now, Craig is the CTO of Belly - the nation's largest owner/operator of consumer-facing tablet devices. When he's not running the world's "funnest" loyalty program he's working with organizations like Chicago Ideas Week or learning to ride motorcycles with his fiance - who also happens to be a leader in the Chicago tech scene.
What are lessons you've learned about working in Chicago that other local entrepreneurs can learn from?
I love Chicago. It's a beautiful and massive city which I've always found to be professionally diverse. People also have a great work ethic here. Draw on this diversity when building your business, you have amazing people here with all the disciplines to be world class in any area. Sales, Marketing, Biz Dev, Analytics, Technology et.al. Remember you should always aim to hire people smarter than you.
What was the the most important lesson you learned while developing Where I've Been and how does that influence your work at Belly?
I learned more than you'd believe - Where I've Been was an amazing ride - growth was explosive and ten million people used the product. It was my first business to hit a million in members and revenue, along with my first introduction to venture capital and ultimately an acquisition. What I learned more than anything was what not to do. Many people take something they love and try to turn it into a business, but I learned it’s much harder that way. I took a love of technology and travel and created the initial Where I’ve Been product as a widget for Facebook. We subsequently spent 4 years trying to back into a business model which was not easy. Products need a market fit, they need to solve a real world problem. You should start with the real problem you're trying to solve and build around it - and think about your revenue model before you start. A company without revenue (or tangible value growth) is really just a hobby.
What new technologies is Belly using in 2014?
At this point it's becoming less about the underlying technology and more about our paradigms. We're the largest owner/operator of customer facing tablets in the US and we have millions of members using the product. The long game for us is about Belly’s platform, what we can build on top of it and allowing partners to leverage it. We're also growing the team aggressively and that's only productive if the foundations are good.
To succeed in our vision everything needs to be be clean, modular, simple and standardized. Everything at Belly is built as a service - small opinionated Ruby apps build on our open sourced micro framework Napa (derived from Grape). Everything is built on these RESTful services, even our homepage. We generate static apps for all the front-end and host them right off the CDN - Angular is our JavaScript framework of choice.
We’re also doing a lot of tooling and automation around development, hosting, testing, monitoring and deployment. Check out our tech blog if you want to see more - we're proud of everything we're doing.
You've grown companies from a founder and a CTO perspective, what is your key to hiring and building teams?
You have to hire carefully and really value your people, supporting and empowering them while enforcing strong values. Culture is a gauge of how well you've done those things. We've always sought the very best people, and we pay them well above market. Our values in engineering center around quality, craft, the community and our products. Once you have these great people, you need to keep reiterating the vision and empowering them to get there. One thing that makes Belly special is that the engineering team owns the product. I believe you get the best people and inspire them most when they own what they’re building.
How do you find Chicago's tech scene?
I built my first company in the south of England, and that was a disaster. The US is the wealthiest, most entrepreneurial-friendly country in the world, and Chicago is the third largest city here. I often hear people say it's hard here, but the truth is it's hard everywhere! There has never been more opportunity in Chicago than there is now and everything is going well. Innovation takes confidence and resolve - no risk, no reward.
And finally, what are your favorite restaurants/activities around the city?
My fiancé Katy Lynch and I are always doing something. We live and play in River North, go boating most weekends in the summer and generally enjoy meeting new people and spending time outside. She shops (a lot!) and I try to pursue a creative side with cooking and photography. We keep busy with random new hobbies - last weekend we both learned to ride motorcycles with Ride Chicago - that was awesome!
View 5 Chicago CTOs You Should Know, Part 1 Here
View 5 Chicago CTOs You Should Know, Part 2 Here
