Jeff Ready - Business Bio
Founder of four companies and an industry trade-group before he turned 29, Jeff Ready defines the word “entrepreneur."
His first company began in the basement of America's top-rated school of engineering, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. There, Ready founded Terre Haute Internet Services, the first business-class ISP in Larry Bird's college town in 1996. After building the business to sustainable profitability, Ready sold the ISP and started Aureate Media in 1998.
Aureate Media developed a unique ad-serving infrastructure and set of technologies that allowed companies to put advertising directly into computer games and other software applications. Internet Venture Capital firm CMGI invested more than $5 million in the company before Ready re-launched Aureate Media as Radiate, Inc. From there, Ready grew Radiate to become one of the largest internet properties, generating over $20 million a year in sales and reaching with more than 30 million people per month through its technology.
In 2000 (while still with Radiate), he founded and served as the first Executive Director of the Internet Measurement Initiative (IMI). This non-profit association was a catalyst for defining new ways to measure digital user audience data, and grew to become 22-member industry association that included Microsoft, AOL Time Warner, DoubleClick, Motorola and other major
corporations. The IMI now exists as the Advertising Research Foundation's Digital MediaMeasurement Council.
In 2001, Radiate was acquired by a privately-held software firm in Seattle, Washington. After this successful cash exit, Ready started Corvigo, his latest venture, serving as it’s president and CEO. Developed the first artificial intelligence and self-learning system for stopping junk email (or “spam”), called Intent-Based Filtering (IBF) technology. Starting Corvigo during the economic doldrums of 2002 (January), Ready led the company to success by doubling revenues every quarter, tightly managing cash-flow, and growing to profitability without raising outside capital. Then, poised for explosive growth with a proven business model behind him, Sequoia Capital, one of the top venture capital firms in the world, chose Corvigo as its only investment in the crowded anti-spam space in 2003.
Corvigo’s technology was a finalist in the Network World Best of the Test review, won first place in InfoWorld's anti-spam bake-off, and was chosen at the Security Venture Fair as the Most Promising Company of 2004. Ready successfully negotiated the acquisition of Corvigo by Tumbleweed Communications (NASDAQ: TMWD) in March 2004 for $41.5 Million. After the
acquisition, Ready served as Tumbleweed’s VP of Marketing before moving on to seek out his next venture.
Ready has been interviewed and quoted in the New York Times, Forbes, Business Week, NPR, Business 2.0, U.S. News and World Report and countless other publications. He was nominated as MIT Technology Review's Top Innovators of 2004 and Corvigo was nominated to Red Herring's Top 100 companies of 2004. He's won the Blue Chip Award from the US Chamber of Commerce, the Ziff Davis Best Technology award, the Rose-Hulman Distinguished Young Alumni Award, and has patented multiple technologies. He sits on board of several technology companies, and is a regular advisor to startups.