Rich Morrow is a passionate Senior Web Technologist with over 17 years experience delivering top-shelf product to Fortune 500 clients such as Amazon.com, FedEx, and Nike; government agencies such as NASA and the US Air Force; and small, fast paced entrepreneurial ventures with limited resources and unlimited workloads / vision. I have spent over 1/2 of my career in the start-up arena and am well-versed in building out infrastructure, processes, and teams which can take businesses to “the next level”. I have nearly singular focus in Free and Open Source Software (or “FOSS”), and am an expert in Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP or “LAMP” stacks.
In a sentence: I specialize in architecture, development and maintenance of large-scale mission-critical custom Web applications, and have an extensive background in building and leading extraordinary technology teams.
My new venture, quicloud, helps small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) understand and appropriately build/manage their services in the cloud — allowing them to dramatically cut costs while simultaneously removing the ceilings on their growth.
quicloud leverages solutions from Amazon’s AWS (EC2, S3, SQS, SNS, etc), Rackspace Cloud (CloudServers, CloudFiles, CloudSites), GoGrid, and others, to build robust Web products with infinite scale and ludicrously low TCO.
What are you working on now?
Security and Scalability products & services (consulting) for SMBs who can oftentimes leverage cloud technologies for dramatic cost savings and improved productivity. My work runs the gamut from developing self-serve SaaS applications to scan and secure Servers to custom Web Software development.
3 trends that excite you?
Cloud (especially Iaas).
Open Source.
Social Media.
How do you bring ideas to life?
Surrounding myself with brilliant people and listening carefully to what they say. Taking time to let good ideas percolate, and openly sharing good ideas with others. Boiling complex problems down to their essence, and staying focused on simplicity, highest value gain, and religiously eliminating all else.
What inspires you?
TED.
The brilliant folks at the DaVinci Institute
What is one mistake you’ve made that our readers can learn from?
Choose happiness over money.
What is one book and one tool that help you bring ideas to life?
I’m heavily influenced by The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.
What is one idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?
Someone please build a competitor to eBay, maybe even a “barter” system. The online auction space is completely stagnant and horrible due to the monopoly.
Who is the one person you’d love to see interviewed on IdeaMensch?
Steven Johnson – author of “Where good ideas come from.”
Why don’t individual Website maintainers (bloggers, individual site operators) focus on security?
Because they think that: 1) it’s too complicated; 2) it will be expensive; 3) they will never get hacked.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. My company offers a service that will scan and secure any Web-connected Linux server for as low as $150. We use automation and open-source software to keep prices low and hackers out.
Connect:
quicloud
Rich Morrow on Facebook
quicloud on Twitter
Mario Schulzke is the Founder of ideamensch, which he started a decade ago to learn from entrepreneurs and give them a platform for their ideas.