Let me tell you a story.
The year was 2007, and as President of DeepCity — the name is a nod to “Deep Town,” a science-fiction virtual-reality city — we pioneered private cloud hosting. The company started in private cloud and managed services, and it succeeded there, long before the sharks of the red ocean swam in. That phrase is not decoration. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google were still treating this as someone else’s pond. A red ocean, in the language of Blue Ocean Strategy, is a market already full of blood. We were not there yet.
The technology had finally made a competitive, compliant service possible. The customers we wanted were small and mid-size organizations. From 2007 to 2009 we knocked on every door that would open: medical offices, real estate offices, hedge funds, car services, law firms.
The hard fight was not technical. It was psychological. We were trying to convince people that a five-year-old Dell or Compaq PC in the closet was not a server strategy. It was safer to let us run the work on our infrastructure. That was a revolution of minds. Small clients got enterprise-level service because of it.
By 2010 the word “cloud” was everyday jargon. Industry people pushed it into every sentence that would hold it. For a technology company still challenging the legacy approach, it remained a battle for the hearts and minds of customers.
Vehiko.com first appeared in 2013. From the beginning the company wanted to move the legacy car-sales industry into ecommerce — simplify the process until buying and selling felt like ordinary business for every side of the table. A new version of the platform went back into that fight with buyers and dealers in July 2022. The May 2023 release added a search that is unusual in that industry: pick the car by the features that matter, instead of walking the classical vehicle-builder path. We are building an intelligent AI advisor for a later version of the platform.
I was glad to be on the Vehiko team as the technology leader. Look at the platform. Buy or sell the next car there. Use the social channels or the contact form and leave feedback. The next evolution of that industry will be built by the people who show up for it.