Do you have any pet peeves/things you hate? What is one thing you couldn’t go a day without, and why?Īir.
I love logic puzzles… and trying to grow a software company from scratch is the most complex puzzle I have ever tried to solve. What’s your favorite thing about working at WSP?
What kind of TV shows, movies, or other entertainment do you partake in?Ī few relatively recent TV shows I love(d) were/are: Entourage, Lost, House of Cards, Breaking Bad, and a new one on Showtime called Billions. Somehow, I managed to negotiate my way out of there with a Mechanical Engineering degree. I was there to see:Ģ) The Fab Five make it to the NCAA National Championship game two years in a rowģ) My entire fraternity (Sigma Chi) get put into alumni status because a national rep showed up unannounced and found 60-something empty kegs in our basement. What programming languages are you fluent in? The water is like glass on most Wednesdays during the school year. We cut out a little early, go to the lake, get in as many back-to-back ski and wakeboard runs as we can, then come home.
We started a tradition in late spring and early fall during the school year called “Watersports Wednesdays”. My wife and three kids also love water sports.
My favorite hobbies are wakeboarding and snowboarding. In the big scheme of things, I am not that great at either of them, but I love them both. What's your favorite hobby/what do you like to do when you're not at work? We got disinvited back to the restaurant, and Linda – our longtime office mom – permanently banned the gift exchange. Not to be deterred, the party-goers turned to the gifts and consumed every drop of alcohol available (including a bottle of homemade everclear, and loads of warm beer). We were at a restaurant and managed to get our bar tab cut off. There’s been tons of funny things, but one standout was the year-end office party we had that ended our gift exchange forever. What's the funniest thing that has happened at Website Pipeline? The business is still growing at a rapid click, and I am totally fired up about the future. I am proud of what the collective team of people at WSP has done.
I am not sure I would ever start another business this way… but the experience has been incredible. It has turned into one of the 500 fastest growing technology companies in North America, and we did it with no debt and no investor money. We lived on naive hope, peanuts for wages, and 100 hour work weeks for several years to get it off the ground. Our early motto was “The hours are long, and the pay is low, but at least we are in a highly unstable work environment.” We literally sketched out the idea for the seed that grew into this business on a napkin over lunch at a local restaurant. What project/goal that you worked on are you most proud of? In 1999, he was one of three who set off to start a business together, and today the company is one of the fastest growing tech companies in North America.Īs everyone in the company inevitably has to endure, we’ve torn him away from his busy schedule, sat him down, and picked his brain for your reading pleasure. Usually accompanied by hand written diagrams and innumerable bullet points. He gets his hands dirty and works hard to keep the momentum of Website Pipeline going strong.Īs many employees will tell you, middle of the night emails are not uncommon. He doesn’t oversee his business dealings from afar. Of course there’s the standard balancing of employee time and cash assets, the strategizing ways to get, keep, and grow customers, and the day-to-day management of employees.īut Seidel isn’t like other CEOs. Brian Seidel’s official title is CEO of Website Pipeline - but whatever you think you know about what a CEO does, you can throw that right out the window.