Social networking is here. And thanks to Leverage Software it is on popular public sites and major private community sites for some of the strongest and most innovative brands in the world, including The New York Times, Dwell Magazine, Charles Schwab, Apple, Oracle, Salesforce.com, Ingram Micro and even Microsoft. Founded in 2003, and already profitable, the company set out to build a robust social networking tool. And that, it did. Today, this San Francisco-based company is the leading provider of online community software and services. The Leverage Community Platform is enabling companies large and small to discover new ways to engage, communicate, and connect with their customer base. Built from the ground up entirely on the Microsoft platform—including the .NET Framework, Visual Studio 2005, and SQL Server—this company’s solutions are available 24/7 and hosted from secure, high availability data centers.

Here’s our recent conversation with Co-Founder and CTO Joseph Kleinschmidt.

Microsoft Startup Zone: Why and When did you first choose the Microsoft Platform?

Joe Kleinschmidt: I’m one of two co-founders, and we chose the .NET platform right out of the gate. We are essentially a .NET company to the core, and have been from day one since we started the company in 2003.

Microsoft Startup Zone: So why .NET specifically?

Kleinschmidt: We are a 100 percent, on-demand Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. We are building a platform for people to use to build online communities. While there were a number of drivers, I think the biggest one was that we wanted to be able to innovate really rapidly. For us, we do frequent product updates, about six a year, so we’re delivering new functionality and features all the time. We wanted to set ourselves up with a tool set that would allow us to develop very rapidly, that’s one side. Then the other part is the scalability issue. We needed to have a highly scalable platform so we could grow quickly. I’ve worked in a number of other software companies, so I had quite a bit of personal experience with using Microsoft tools in the past. Although at the time, the .NET platform did not have the adoption it has now—the more we learned about it, the more we liked it. We really liked the developer focus, seemed well engineered and architected, so from a technical perspective, it just made sense.

MSUZ: What one Microsoft technology is most critical to your business model/success, and why?

Kleinschmidt: I would have to say .NET again, as far as a technology. We tend to hire really experienced software developers. That means we get developers who have done C++, Java, Ruby, Perl and PHP, etc. So for us, collectively, we wanted a language or a development framework that felt very natural to us, one that allowed us to develop and design in the way we wanted. I’ve probably built applications in a half dozen languages and platforms—so based on that experience, we wanted to develop a code base that was built on a framework that made sense to us. The .NET Framework has really been the homerun for us. We also use other technologies on the Microsoft stack.

MSUZ: Overall, what have been the key quantifiable benefits of using Microsoft technologies?

Kleinschmidt: At the highest level, the number one thing we’re trying to achieve is to make our customers as happy as possible as quickly as possible. That comes down to how rapidly we can innovate—the quantitative number is not just how quickly can we deliver, but how quickly can we deliver things our customers really love. What’s interesting about our world, in this Web 2.0, social networking, online community industry, where I think everyone talks about speed to market—there is an assumption that you get that speed by getting a bunch of people in a garage and making something really cool over the weekend. But I don’t think that’s quite right, not if you want to build something for the long-term. For example, I used to develop applications that were used on the Chicago Board of Trade or by pharmaceutical companies for drug screening. These were mission-critical applications used in a very professional setting. What is interesting is that developing for us in this Web 2.0 industry is actually more like creating those systems than doing, say, a desktop application—that is, you get that speed to market because of reliability, scalability, all those critical underlying things. For starters, if you don’t have reliability, you don’t have anything.

So we talk a lot about how we’re going to achieve 4 9’s or 5 9’s uptime—a lot of things you might typically hear about in, say, financial applications. We pay a lot of attention to this, and it’s one of the reasons we have such a strong focus on the .NET Framework. On top of that reliability, we need scalability. It is not uncommon for us to get tens of thousands of new users in a 24-hour period. From a scalability point of view, we need to scale in quick bursts. We may suddenly have 100,000 new people using our system, and that happens not over a few years, but over a few weeks. Reliability is the base, then scalability on top of that. Once you have those pillars taken care of, then you can say, "now we can quickly build some really cool features that people will love (and deliver them in a hurry) because we have the stuff under the hood really taken care of." Our choice of Microsoft technologies has really contributed to this.

MSUZ: Can you give us some stats about the largest number of users or page views that your private sites get?

Kleinschmidt: That’s an interesting question. It really varies; some communities might serve up perhaps 10 million page views a month, while others might start out with just a few hundred people. That’s the true beauty of creating a system that is on-demand and multi-tenant—it just gives you so much flexibility. We really want to be in a position to be able to say “yes” to our customers wherever we can.

I’ll give you one example of our approach there from a technology standpoint. While we’re a .NET shop, we live in the on-demand world—so that means we have to be as open as we possibly can be. So what we’ve done is to create a set of Web service APIs around each feature we create, and actually, .NET has been a really good platform from which to do that. I want to say to our customers, you can use whatever technology is working the best for you—and you can integrate our platform into that. If you’re also .NET, great, but if you’re not, that’s absolutely fine too. The key is to really build something wonderful together.

MSUZ: What Microsoft technologies will you support or integrate in the future, and why?

Kleinschmidt: We’re watching Silverlight, really eying it, and are cautiously optimistic. I mentioned some of my own background has been in building systems that analyzed financial data, or, say, research tools used in the drug-screening fields—and I’ve seen a lot of amazing value in being able to represent information in unique, unusual ways. So Silverlight is a tool that looks pretty interesting. I’d love to see if we could start designing, creating, and delivering those novel applications that are new, and different, and serve them up over the Web and have that great end-user experience. So it’s something we’ll be looking at, depending on where Microsoft takes it, there are things we’d like to see them do, and then we’ll become more interested.

At this point, we’ve actually gone so far as to create a proof-of-concept based on Silverlight with the assistance of some absolutely wonderful people at Microsoft. Exploring a new technology is, in my opinion, about twenty percent technology and eighty percent people, and so seeing how Microsoft is approaching this roll-out in a more open way, I really appreciate that.

MSUZ: So what things do you want to see Microsoft doing with Silverlight?

Kleinschmidt: I think it comes down to Microsoft being able to achieve the right balance between providing a substantially better, very compelling user experience for a Web user, and I mean it really has to be markedly better. Google Maps uses none of that, and people love it—you can’t come out with something that’s just a little bit cooler—it has to really knock people’s socks off. On the flip side, it has to be very developer friendly: easy to work with, to design with, to develop with.

If you focus on only one side of that, that’s difficult—I think it really has to be both. You have to be able to do the cool stuff, and build it in a way that it is simple and, especially, easy to maintain. That is where Silverlight is quite interesting.

I’d like to see Silverlight make people say ‘wow, we’ve never seen that before.’ Then internally facing, would like to make the developers say, ‘wow, this is so easy to get to that leap forward, and I can do more and more with it, just like my existing .NET tools.’ There is a lot of potential, but it takes time to get that balance right.

Joe Kleinschmidt's Background

Joseph Kleinschmidt, CTO and Founder, has extensive expertise in product development and management, including experience in the financial, biotech, energy, Internet and multimedia industries, and has worked with a variety of firms from small software startups to larger organizations such as Lucent and Macromedia. Past experience includes leading the development of mission-critical financial risk management software, advising energy companies on their technology needs in the face of deregulation, and developing industry-leading scientific research software for Axon Instruments (acquired by Molecular Devices) in use by large pharmaceutical companies worldwide. Kleinschmidt holds a degree from Northwestern University.

For more, read the Leverage Software success story, ‘Businesses Connect, Communicate and Collaborate with Leverage Software.’