Laura Zastrow
Jon Hardin — The reclusive genius
By any measure, Jon Hardin is the portrait of millennial entrepreneurial success. His name is on the door of one of Madison’s oldest and most successful tech companies. And he made the UW-Madison Alumni Association’s Forward Under 40 list when he was just 25 years old.
But the 29-year-old president and CEO of Hardin Design & Development tends to shy away from the spotlight. And when he gets home from work, you won’t catch him near a computer.
He lives in a gorgeous house on eight acres in Verona, which he owns free and clear. His garage, which he remodeled all by himself, is filled with luxury vehicles — Porsche, Jaguar, Mercedes. He loves fine dining and wine so much that he hand-built his very own cellar, with room to store more than 800 bottles. He’s addicted to home improvement projects, harvesting timber from his property to build things like an outdoor fire pit with seating for up to 40 friends. Life is good in the Hardin household.
“People joke that I’m kind of a recluse,” Hardin says. “I’m not someone who’s going to 10 networking events a week. I’d rather be out working on my land.”
Madison’s tech and startup scene has exploded in the last decade, with local innovators and industry groups continually pushing it to become the entrepreneurial epicenter for the entire Midwest. Many of the local success stories have since become household names — Epic Systems and its various spinoffs, EatStreet and the ever-growing stable of local food tech companies, PerBlue, Raven Software and the array of other gaming companies. But while some startup stories have garnered attention and grabbed headlines, other innovators tend to fly more under the radar.
Hardin says he’s “not really wired to seek out publicity” — a personality type that makes him unique among CEOs.
“Jon is definitely an enigmatic figure in the tech community,” says co-founder Scott Resnick, who serves as the public face of Hardin Design & Development. “I get to go do fun outreach and sell the Hardin brand, and Jon’s back at HQ doing programming — and that’s what he does very well.”
Hardin’s close friends like to joke that he’s always one stroke shy of perfection — he scored 35 out of 36 on the ACT; he got one B in college. But he’s earned a reputation for hard work and intellect through his record of solving some of the toughest software engineering problems brought forth by his clients.
“Folks may not see that side of Hardin, but he’s the engine that drives the company,” Resnick says.
Since the company’s humble beginnings in a dorm room on the second floor of UW-Madison’s Chadbourne Hall, Hardin Design & Development’s business has grown considerably. What started as two college kids trolling Craigslist for freelance web development gigs has evolved to a fully fledged boutique software development firm with offices in Madison, Chicago and Dallas and an extensive list of clients, both domestic and international.
These days, Hardin Design & Development has as an average of 30 different projects in the pipeline at any given time. They range considerably in size and scope — the smallest can be knocked out by a single developer in three days, and the largest can take a team of five developers up to four years to build.
One such project, which Hardin describes as the “crown jewel” of the company’s portfolio, is called Visual Manager, a commercial real estate management and business intelligence platform that the company developed at the request of a client, Fischer & Company. It’s now being used by FedEx, IBM and a host of other big companies. The technology is a complex marriage of data storage and analytics, which allows users to take information from disparate sources and gain insight on things like competitor locations, market characteristics and demographic trends.
The Visual Manager project was a massive undertaking — not to mention a huge get for the small company — but both Hardin and Resnick speak modestly about landing the deal, crediting the intersecting relationships they’ve built over the years and the stellar reputation the firm has established.
“At the end of the day, it all goes back to talent,” Resnick says. “And Jon is one of the best developers, if not the best developer, I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.”
Hardin is hardly the only hard-working entrepreneur to escape notice. The city is filled with people quietly pursuing innovative ideas and shaping Madison’s future. But, like Hardin, they all have a story to tell.
Laura Zastrow
Winnie Karanja — The inspirer
Winnie Karanja has a vivid memory of what it felt like to be the only girl — and the only African American — in her web design class at McFarland High School.
“I remember thinking, ‘This isn’t okay,’” says Karanja, who immigrated to the Madison area from Kenya with her parents and sister in 1999. “There’s such a benefit to having diversity in the tech field.”
Women and minorities are notoriously underrepresented in the tech industry, both in Madison and across the nation. Karanja’s desire to shift those demographics and encourage girls and students of color to break into the field led her to create Maydm, an educational nonprofit that teaches kids a range of entry-level tech industry skills. Karanja founded the initiative in November 2015, and in the first teaching sessions held from April through June of this year, she’s reached more than 80 students. Of those, 40% were girls, and 76% were students of color — statistics that are “very unlike the tech field,” Karanja says. She’s still analyzing demographic data for sessions held in July and August.
“Technology is made for everybody, but it’s not made by everybody,” Karanja says. Maydm, which is a play off the phrase “made by them,” aims to get students comfortable with the idea that they, too, can code the next big app or build the next iPhone.
Karanja is young — she’s under 30, but she declines to reveal her exact age, out of concerns that people in the industry won’t take her seriously. A self-taught coder and a graduate of the London School of Economics and Politics with a bachelor’s in education and a master’s in developmental economics, Karanja says her background gives her a “unique and intersectional worldview” that has helped define Maydm’s platform. As a teacher, she sees technology-focused education as an essential tool to propel girls and students of color into higher-earning jobs. And as a developmental economist, she knows that good jobs are among the most important factors for reducing poverty, hunger and housing insecurity among vulnerable populations.
“The average tech job in Wisconsin [pays] $70,000 per year,” Karanja says. “That’s where we want our students to be.”
Maydm targets youth from third to 12th grade, offering single-day and weekend training sessions as well as a flagship, semester-long course that officially launches this fall with the new school year. The program is fee-based, but Maydm partners with sponsor organizations to provide scholarships for low-income students. Students learn technical skills, including programming and working with open-source electronic hardware, as well as soft skills like communication, teamwork, leadership and resume-writing. Students develop a portfolio showcasing the skills they learned from Maydm, which they can use as a reference when looking for a job. Partners from local tech companies, like Bendyworks and Zendesk, serve as mentors, giving students an insider’s look at how the industry works.
Surveys given to Maydm participants before and after the course show that the curriculum has a big impact on the way students think about themselves and technology. Karanja believes Maydm will eventually become known as a “top talent pipeline” that connects bright young workers from diverse backgrounds to job opportunities at local tech companies. In the future, she plans to form an alumni network to make sure program graduates remain connected as they begin their professional lives.
“If Wisconsin is moving to become a tech hub,” Karanja says, “it should not be an afterthought to bring in girls and students of color.”
Laura Zastrow
Fred Willis — The playmaker
Former Wisconsin Badgers football player Fred Willis can pinpoint the exact moment he realized that his heart wasn’t in the game.
He was in the locker room with his teammates before the 2011 Big 10 conference home opener against Nebraska — a huge game versus a brand-new rival — and the players were swept up in an impassioned pep talk by one of the coaches.
“[The coach] was so pumped up, and everybody was so geeked,” Willis recalls. “He looks around and starts yelling, ‘Everybody’s been waiting for a moment like this all their lives, right?’”
The players roared their agreement, but the question gave Willis, then a freshman wide receiver, pause. Unlike his teammates, many of whom had been training since elementary school, he hadn’t been waiting his whole life for that moment — in fact, he had only been playing football for a few years when college recruiters started calling.
“Literally everybody was like, ‘Hell yes!’” Willis remembers. “And I was there just thinking, ‘Maybe I’m in the wrong place.’”
Willis hung up his jersey in August 2012 — a move that cost him a full-ride scholarship to UW-Madison. Struggling to pay for school and unsure what career path to pursue, he eventually dropped out, entering what he calls his “free-fall” phase. He dabbled in graphic design, videography, studied financial planning and eventually decided to teach himself computer programming.
Willis, whose decision to quit football stemmed in part from a desire to have more control over his time, saw web development as a good opportunity for him to earn a living while working independently and being his own boss.
“I needed something that fit into my schedule, but I didn’t have $19,000 to spend on a three-month [coding program],” says Willis, who then enrolled in a part-time web developer course that was offered online. Within a month, he had mastered the basics of Ruby on Rails, a widely used full-stack language, and built his first website, a simple blog.
“It wasn’t hard for me to pick up at all,” says Willis, noting that he’s always been a bit of a natural with computers and technology and that there are a number of other “techies” in his family. “I didn’t learn everything, but I went straight for the core.”
In June, Willis, now 23, launched his business, Hacknvest, which combines his specialties: web development and financial investing. He builds software for his “strategic partners” in exchange for a percentage of their business, then he turns around and invests the capital to generate even more income. So far, he’s built relationships with local businesses like the Soap Opera and Dane Buy Local, as well as a number of financial companies and nonprofits.
“I don’t really have clients [so much as] I try to build relationships with other business entities,” Willis says.
Inspired by Warren Buffett, Willis’ investing skills are also self-taught. And he’s incorporated his tech skills into his strategy, building a “web scraping” program that harvests information on undervalued stocks, which he then considers when diversifying his portfolio. Eventually, his goal is to bring in five figures of business each month. He’s not quite there yet, but he says persistence, networking and continually learning new skills will help him land that “big breadwinner.”
Though he’s found success as a programmer and enjoys being an entrepreneur, Willis says it isn’t just the work that he’s passionate about — it’s more about the freedom to make his own schedule and be his own boss that his independent venture allows.
“I like the idea of having time and money,” Willis says. “It’s important for me to have a balance of both.”
Laura Zastrow
Kelly Ehlers — The socialite
As president of a company that specializes in social media, Kelly Ehlers doesn’t exactly intend to fly under the radar. But her highly specialized niche business is rare in the world of marketing and advertising agencies.
“It was a real gamble focusing on social in the beginning,” says Ehlers, recalling the countless times potential clients said they could just have the intern do it. She always responded by asking, “Would you give your intern a microphone and let them be on the 6 o’clock news?”
“That’s what it’s like if they’ve got the keys to your social media,” she says. “[Companies] are just now catching on to it.”
Ehlers founded her agency, Ideas that Evoke, in 2009, in the midst of the recession and a time of massive upheaval in technology, media and communication. Ehlers was also pregnant with her first child, and her husband had just lost his job. “My husband and I decided to sort of put all our chips on the table,” she says.
At that point in the late 2000s, the concept of social media as an e-commerce and communication tool was only just beginning to take shape. Blogging emerged as a platform for brands and influencers, Facebook for businesses became available and widely used, and Twitter was beginning its meteoric rise as a direct marketing and communication device. Technology like Instagram, Snapchat, Periscope and Facebook Live weren’t even in the picture yet.
Especially in those early years, companies didn’t quite understand the nascent technology — let alone how to harness its potential. But Ehlers, who was working at a traditional advertising agency at the time, took notice that some of the big, international brands were starting to “dip their toes in the water” of social media. She was fascinated — and hooked.
“It was kind of opportunistic,” she says. “I thought, ‘Let’s just see where this goes.’”
At first, it took a lot of convincing on Ehlers’ part even to get companies to consider adding a line item in their budget for social media. Businesses understood things like print advertising, radio spots and billboards, but social media was an intangible — up until the point that it started proving its worth.
“We can target messages exactly to [a demographic] and turn that lead into a sale,” Ehlers says. And when clients see results, “it’s magical to them.”
Over the last seven years, Ehlers has transformed her one-woman agency into a bustling company with more than 30 employees. She hired her first employee four years ago, but the majority of the company’s growth happened in the past year and a half. She specializes in the beauty, lifestyle and luxury market, representing a number of international clients, including Elizabeth Arden and Proctor & Gamble. In 2015, Ideas that Evoke was named one of the best entrepreneurial companies in the nation by Entrepreneur magazine. This year, it landed a spot on Inc. Magazine’s list of the 500 fastest-growing private companies in the nation. It grew 1,000% in the last three years.
Here in Madison, Ehlers is partnering with Mary Burke to launch a new initiative called “Building Brave,” a nonpolitical organization that launches this fall. The first event is set for September, but Ehlers can’t release many details, other than saying it will encourage people to step out of their comfort zones.
“It’s all about lifestyle, wellness and professional development,” Ehlers says. “We’re bringing these things to other women, which is something I’m really passionate about.”
Laura Zastrow
Ted Gurman — The guru
Ted Gurman isn’t your typical tech entrepreneur. He spends more time on a yoga mat than he does in front of a computer screen.
“There’s absolutely nothing technical about anything I’ve ever done in my whole life,” he says with a laugh. But the lack of a technical background didn’t stop him from founding BlueTree Network, a health care information technology consulting firm that specializes in Epic software.
Getting into consulting is a common next step for former Epic employees like Gurman, 36, who was a project manager for the health care software giant from 2006 to 2010. But Gurman, who founded BlueTree with fellow Epic graduate Reggie Luedtke, wanted to build something that was different from the traditional consulting firm. Established in 2012, the company has grown to employ nearly 250 people and has offices in Madison, Denver and New York City. About 180 employees work remotely at client sites.
“It’s very common in the consulting world for folks to feel like they’re on an island, like they’re part of a company, but only by name,” says Gurman. “Once they’re done onboarding, done with their background check and done getting their insurance in place, they never hear from the company again.”
Not so at BlueTree, where employees are affectionately known as “Blue Leaves.” The company’s philosophy is rooted in the idea of wellness, community-building and development — both professional and personal. From the start, Gurman made it his mission to make his holistic approach to health and mindfulness a central pillar of the company — he gave himself the title of “Minister of Happiness.”
“We find that when someone becomes a Blue Leaf, they want to continue working for us,” Gurman says. “It feels like a family.”
The company has an advocacy program that matches new hires with mentors who are dedicated to help facilitate their “personal and professional happiness” at BlueTree, and the company’s structure is not hierarchical. Every employee gets a FitBit and is encouraged to participate in company-wide fitness challenges. Standing desks are available to anybody who wants one. There’s a BlueTree “Give Committee,” funded by a donation from the company’s annual budget and made up of volunteers who meet monthly to decide what kind of philanthropy or volunteer work they’d like to pursue. BlueTree holds volunteering events in the Madison community every two months, and it coordinates with the New York and Denver offices as well. And like many startups, BlueTree offers unlimited vacation — and Gurman makes sure people know that it’s acceptable (and expected) that employees take full advantage of the perk.
“I think there’s a generational shift where millennials have different expectations for their work environment. There’s no longer this broad perspective that work is supposed to be unpleasant,” he says. “The way I see it, you only live once. Why would you want anything less?”
