Reenvisioning the complexity and security of enterprise mobile development

Brendan McCorkle is the CEO of CloudMine. Headquartered in Philadelphia, with offices in Boston and San Francisco, CloudMine aims to reduce the complexity of backend development for enterprises everywhere. The platform emphasizes mobile performance as well as security and compliance, allowing organizations in a variety of highly-regulated industries to launch mobile initiatives quickly and reliably. Prior to starting CloudMine, Brendan founded Fourth Power Solutions, Textaurant, and the Free Beer Company. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate program of Technology Management.

Brendan McCorkle spoke with Jeff Mack, Executive Managing Director at Newmark Grubb Frank, for this interview.

JEFF MACK: I’m Jeff Mack from Newmark Grubb Knight Frank, and I’m pleased to welcome Brendan McCorkle, the CEO of a company called CloudMine, to citybizlist. Welcome Brendan. Where did you originally get the idea for CloudMine?

BRENDAN MCCORKLE: The original idea for CloudMine was a business modeling class at Penn. My original partner Mo and I took two business ideas through the class—very extensive assumption modeling—we built an overly complicated spreadsheet to test all of these assumptions, and CloudMine actually was the one that held up. So we ran with it for a little while and were building a media archiving—I would say “platform,” because that’s what we do now, but at the time it was a very, very bare bones demonstration that any part of it could work at all. We found out very quickly that no one wanted to use that but they wanted to build this platform, which is now what we do underneath it for their applications. After, in hindsight, way too long—it took 13 or 14 times running into someone who really wanted this platform—before we realized maybe we should do that, not the media archiving.

Q. Why did you first focus on media archiving?

A. What’s interesting about the media archiving is it’s what got Marc [Weil] and Ilya [Braude] interested in joining me to start any company whatsoever. It got Ilya away from Drankontas, another local startup, and it got Marc away from Oracle. The original idea that I was working on was just images for user generated content, and Marc and Ilya were each working on video and audio user generated content, so that was the idea that sort of pulled the three of us together: one business guy and two engineers all tackling the three stripes or forms of user generated media. Even though the market told us very quickly to do something else, it’s what pulled us all together and got CloudMine into the market. I think that’s actually one of the most important things for any startup: what gets you to the table. Usually the game plan or plot changes, but you have to get to the table in the first place.

Q. You received $5 million in funding from Safeguard earlier this year. How did you get hooked up with them?

A. Safeguard is local, so they have sort of unfair access to CloudMine. The members of the Safeguard family have seen us back all the way to when I was in grad school pitching this other idea—which, by the way, wasn’t interesting them at all, but they saw the evolution of myself and my co-founders as professionals and entrepreneurs, as well as the product from this B2C offering on top of an imaginary platform to us actually building that platform and growing to an enterprise space and company.

The easy answer obviously is we’re in Philly and they’re in Philly, so like I said the access—I call it unfair access because Silicon Valley investors obviously can’t get coffee with CloudMine all that often—but it’s also that there’s a shared vision for the region where all of us are interested in building the ecosystem and trying to fill in any missing gaps. One of those gaps is having companies that are based here, funded here, have a liquidity event that gives money back to the fund and to the entrepreneurs. That’s one of the things we’re very personally passionate about and part of why we are excited that we do have investors locally, because now the professional and the personal goals are in alignment.

Q. What does the funding mean to the company at this stage?

A. We have the funding for operations, which the company needs, but we’re also now one step towards that goal of creating more later stage—you know, creating investors from our own company. A lot of times in Philly that moves to New York or that moves to Silicon Valley or moves to DC, so being able to help try to bridge that gap and keep that reinforcement positively here is very exciting for us.

Q. Can you tell us about your experience with DreamIt?

A. We did DreamIt in the fall of 2011. There’s actually a funny story about DreamIt: people talk about taking calculated risks in business and we have a very personal one there. We actually applied—and by we I say, I applied to DreamIt and they didn’t want to let us in without knowing that Marc and Ilya were on board—Marc didn’t want to leave his job at Oracle until we were into DreamIt. And so I of course told DreamIt that Marc was on board and we got into DreamIt, and I told Marc, and he left his job and was on board. So, that was definitely a risk because it was approaching truth maybe not quite like the truth at the time. Of course Marc was very excited and we all jumped in and quit whatever we were doing. I finished grad school, he left Oracle, Ilya left Drakontas, and we started DreamIt, so that was pretty exciting. Marc likes to tease me about that because it was sort of his introduction to how business really works, and so it was a good process.

We spent the fall of 2011 building a platform and we launched in October, right in the middle of the cycle, we started late August through the holidays. Right in the middle we launched CloudMine as it is today, just sort of the first version of CloudMine. Then, we got our first funding, so right after the holidays, so it was a nice kick in to the market and then some support personally and professionally into the start of our venture backing—the next year, early 2012.

ABOUT NEWMARK GRUBB KNIGHT FRANK

Newmark Grubb Knight Frank (NGKF) is one of the world's leading commercial real estate advisory firms. Together with London-based partner Knight Frank and independently-owned offices, NGKF’s 12,800 professionals operate from more than 370 offices in established and emerging property markets on six continents.

With roots dating back to 1929, NGKF’s strong foundation makes it one of the most trusted names in commercial real estate. NGKF’s full-service platform comprises BGC’s real estate services segment, offering commercial real estate tenants, landlords, investors and developers a wide range of services including leasing; capital markets services, including investment sales, debt placement, appraisal, and valuation services; commercial mortgage brokerage services; as well as corporate advisory services, consulting, project and development management, and property and corporate facilities management services. For further information, visit www.ngkf.com.

NGKF is a part of BGC Partners, Inc., a leading global brokerage company servicing the financial and real estate markets. BGC’s common stock trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol (NASDAQ: BGCP). BGC also has an outstanding bond issuance of Senior Notes due June 15, 2042, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol (NYSE: BGCA). BGC Partners is led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Howard W. Lutnick. For more information, please visit www.bgcpartners.com.

Visit CloudMine's Website for more information.

Jeffrey E. Mack, Executive Managing Director

Jeffrey E. Mack is a senior leader in Newmark Grubb Knight Frank's Philadelphia operation. Jeff has been a significant member of the commercial brokerage community in Philadelphia since 1979. He co-founded Smith Mack & Co. in 1984 and has continued to lease and sell more suburban office space than any other individual agent. He served as past chairman of the Philadelphia Board of Realtors, commercial and industrial division. NGKF acquired Smith Mack & Co. in 2012.

Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

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