Chris Lyman Email & Phone Number

Austin, Tx, Us

Los Angeles, California, United States

Austin, Tx

Multifamily turnover management

San Francisco / Ukraine

Rock-solid Java in the Cloud. Auto-scales. Easy to deploy. Runs ANY Java app. The new way to PAAS.

Los Angeles

Consultancy focusing on a product-last approach. We reverse engineer market demand into market fit, in effort to reduce waste and maximize sales.

Los Angeles

Internet radio featuring local artists.

Los Angeles

A people rating engine whose modest goal was to provide Yelp-style ratings for every human on earth. We started with a slick mobile app but couldn't acquire significant traction. We then pivoted toward allowing blog readers to rate famous people (ie politicians) right from within the article they were reading. Our blog plugin got 2M hits per month, but ultimately the thesis proved flawed. My first and only dead-pool and boy did I learn a lot.

Los Angeles

Fonality is a cloud & open-source based PBX competitor to Avaya and Cisco. The goal was to leverage the cloud to create a geographically agnostic phone system that did not moor employees to their cubes. With baked in call center features and unified messaging, we were able to fulfill our slogan of "A big business phone system for a small business price." I raised $25M of funding over four rounds from Intel, DFJ, and Azure -- leading to a nine figure valuation. After my initial six years as CEO, CTO, and Head of Product, Fonality is still going strong with hundreds of employees and ever-increasing market share.

I founded and led Virtualis (later Hosting.com) as one of the world's first hosting companies. We were a channel play, selling hosting exclusively through our 45,000 web designers (which was at that time the world's largest reseller program). Hosting.com was famous for pioneering the now-standard concept of a "dashboard / control panel". We even built our own data center in downtown Los Angeles (yep, that's what you had to do in those days). Backed by $9M from investors Adobe, H&Q, and Knight-ridder, Hosting.com grew to ~$10M in recurring revenue and exited to Allegiance Telecom (NASDAQ: ALGX) for $30M after dotcom had crashed. Hosting.com is still around today -- 15+ years later!