For those of you who don’t know, our founders are an adventurous husband and wife duo who grew up in Houston, Texas. They’ve gone from the Peace Corps in Brazil in the 70s to working in communications law, launching one of the first 50 ISPs in the U.S. to building the world-class data center company that Data Foundry is today. This month, they were featured in a local Houston magazine, Voyage Houston, where they tell their story:
Ron & Carolyn breaking ground for our Texas 1 data center in Austin.
Ron & Carolyn, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
We both grew up in Houston and attended U of H. After college, we served in the Peace Corps together in Brazil. There, we worked on community development in the favelas of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. We’ve always liked adventure, and an adventurous spirit is what led us to starting our own business. In 1994, we launched Texas.Net, one of the first 50 Internet service providers (ISPs) in the United States. We started Texas.Net in San Antonio, because at that time, no one in San Antonio had Internet service. Where many people saw risk, we saw an opportunity. We had a down payment saved for a house at the time. Rather than go through with buying the house, we decided to forfeit the earnest money and use our down payment to buy equipment and launch Texas.Net. Soon after launching in San Antonio, we branched out to Houston, Austin and Dallas.
Later, in the early 2000s, large telephone companies started to dominate the Internet market and made it harder and harder for small ISPs to compete. It was during this time we decided to innovate and create Data Foundry.
In addition to Texas.Net and Data Foundry, Ron and Carolyn established a Usenet company, Giganews, and an Internet security solutions company, Golden Frog, which provides one of the world’s leading VPN services, VyprVpn.
Please tell us about Data Foundry.
We provide colocation services in premier carrier-neutral data centers. What sets Data Foundry apart from the competition is our people. Our core team has been with us since the beginning. We are craftsmen, meaning we strive for excellence in all we do. It’s not just about getting a job done. It’s about being the best. If our core team hadn’t stayed with us, it would have been much more difficult to enforce our standards for excellence.
Read the rest of Ron & Carolyn’s story on voyagehouston.com.