Personal Profile

Andrew Rouchotas

• Born: May 27 1971, Toronto, Canada
• Occupation: CEO Cartika IT Solution Providers Inc
• Website URL: www.cartika.com
• Hobbies: Playing Hockey, Snowboarding, Wake Boarding, Jet Skiing, Roller Blading, Mountain Biking, Lifting Weights
• Favourite Places: Corfu, Buckhorn Lake, Kicking Horse, Zihuatanejo
• Ethnicity: Canadian/Greek
• Sign: Gemini
• Status: Wife Erin
• Children: One Daughter, just turned 3
• Pets: Jasper (Rhodesian Ridge Back) and Duke (Yellow Lab crossed with ?)

Biography

OK – so, I feel like doing something a little different here.  Heck, I am not looking for a job, and I see no reason to post my resume here.  Our Social Media consultant is continually beating me over the head to stop being so formal on my blog, and to start showing our readers the “real me” – so – lets give that a shot…

I will more then likely spend some more time on this portion in the future.  Even thinking about writing this portion of my profile has led me to the extremely self righteous position of wanting to write an auto-biography at some point – not that many would read it, nor is it likely to ever make a best sellers list, in anywhere more prominent then a small kraal – none the less, the notion intrigues me.

For now however, I will be much more reserved and factual – not to mention brief – then what a typical autobiography would accommodate…

I was born and raised in Toronto.  At various points while growing up, my family lived in downtown Toronto, later in suburbs like Scarborough and Unionville (where my family still live).  I grew up as any Canadian kid would – I played lots of hockey, was involved in various other sports (track and field, soccer, etc) and worked my way into Canadian society while being raised by hard working – and devoted – landed immigrant parents.

When going to University, I ended up settling at the University of Guelph – simply for the reason that Biology fascinated me, they had the best Human Biology program in the country – and well, truth be told – they were the only undergraduate program which had a real Human Anatomy course that got students working directly with cadavers (I just thought it would be cool – turned out to be pretty creepy – though extremely challenging and interesting).  After a long career at the U of G, I decided to face the real world (not too mention an out of control student loan) and graduated with an honors B.SC in Human Biology with Specializations in Biomechanics and Work Physiology (now theres a mouthful).  I was able to land a job with a Medical Manufacturer of patient lifting equipment (and various other technologies) and they shipped me out west to Vancouver to help them design and build their products.  Very interesting job as I spent the majority of my time interacting with nurses and other health care professionals.  Simply wonderful people.  Trying very hard to avoid a controversial political statement here – but, something needs to be done about the health care system in Canada.  I have no idea what the solution is, or any of idea of what recommendation to make.  But, I can say that health care professionals are seriously understaffed, overworked and under compensated in Canada and that the average Canadian will have a hard time ever getting Medical Attention that demonstrates any reasonable value for the taxes they pay. That is until they are critically ill or injured – at which point, they will receive treatment that is comparable to anything available to anyone in the world.  Again, no answers, or even remotely good ideas here, just observations.

While in Vancouver, I ended up taking up snowboarding.  First few years were fun (and painful), but now, 20 years later, boarding of all sorts (snowboarding, wake boarding, kite boarding) are a pretty big part of my life.  I ended up leaving my job after 4 years, and spent the next 2 years snowboarding in British Columbia and then back packing through Mexico, trying to decide what I wanted to do next.  I had already decided that the B.Sc. degree I received from Guelph was useful for my own personal knowledge, my own training and lifestyle, etc – but, functionally, as a career – the degree was useless.  I had zero interest working in a lab, or as a trainer or even to design medical equipment.  I simply was not going to be happy with that career choice.  So, I decided to apply for several different jobs at all sorts of companies.  I quickly realized, that since I was not trained at anything other then Biology, I really could not apply for any job that required a specific skill outside of my area of expertise.  I also didn’t have enough experience to apply for management positions, etc..  I was pretty well stuck, and decided being a sales professional was a great idea!  After all, I get along with people, I’m outgoing, I can communicate easily with people and well – the idea of non capped earnings just appealed to me.  I ended up getting an entry level job with IBM in a call center selling PC’s and Servers to home users and small business clients.

At IBM I excelled – I just really liked computers.  At first, it was funny.  I had not used a modern PC ever (though I did own a Commodore 64 at some point).  I was still submitting hand written essays and such when I finished University.  Everything was new to me.  Windows?  I had no clue – I mean I had heard of Microsoft and Windows (who hadn’t), but, I had never used computers.  Everyone else was surfing on the internet, and I simply never bothered to even look.  I was far too busy snowboarding and traveling.  Needless to say, here I was, this “old man” working with fresh graduates and I was a bit of a laughing stock – until that is – 6 months in, I was the top producer for the company and did it for the next 5 years in my respective position.  After 4 promotions in 5 years, I finally received the job I really wanted (which in retrospect was beyond ridiculous as it was a title and essentially the same job) as a Client Manager for IBM’s major clients in Alberta, Canada (mostly a Petro-Chemical vertical).  Actually, thinking about this rationally, this was a really cool job.  I got to travel A LOT, big expense accounts from both IBM and the Petro-Chem companies.  Loads and loads of training and education from IBM and received significant insight into the future of IT.  We were designing, structuring and delivering “On Demand” solutions for customers almost 15 years ago.  Of course these days, they call this cloud computing.  Heck, Cartika is one of the first providers to offer Cloud Computing as a service in the market, and we were still 15 years late to the party.  End of the day though, what I learned from IBM was that there is no such thing as “uncapped” earnings.  I also learned that I had no place working in a large corporate environment.  The pay was good (though not “uncapped” as they claimed), the job was a lot of fun and challenging, but, the politics were just unbearable.  This was a large personal battle for me, as I was succeeding at IBM, I loved the job – and wasn’t sure if I was simply having a hard time accepting my life, or corporate life really wasn’t for me.  Likely this is just a personality flaw in me specifically – as my wife has absolutely thrived on big corporate politics.  I think this is one of those things where you are either have the right personality for large corporate life, or you don’t.  I honestly believe there is no in between.  End of the day though, from IBM I realized where the world was heading, where the technology was heading and an absolutely massive market that was sitting there waiting to be serviced.  So, lacking all logic and reason and intelligence, right in the middle of the dotcom bust, while people were losing fortunes and the economy was crumbling – I decided to leave IBM and start a dotcom.  Cartika was born.

Starting a dotcom was quite the adventure in those days.  I started off, literally on my couch with a laptop and a domain name – deciding I was going to offer Open Source based ecommerce solutions for small and medium businesses.  OSCommerce was the preferred application of the day, and so off I went, door to door – selling ecommerce websites to whoever I could.  Back in those days, Cartika had a reseller account with a hosting provider (we eventually quietly acquired this provider and their customers many years later).  I remember I was building websites for free.  Installing osCommerce, doing some CSS work, training customers on the software – and I did it all for free.  The only fee I charged back then was a monthly hosting fee.  My thinking at the time was – I just gave up my job, I have a house, mortgage, car payment, etc – I better get some recurring income before I run out of money.  So, I worked 20 hours a day for the first few months and finally was making enough recurring revenue to cover my expenses.

I do not want to go into an extensive Cartika history at this point, as at some point, I would like to document the various challenges associated with building this company and really spend some time analyzing our decisions and our evolution.  I think it will be a very valuable tool ultimately for myself personally, as well as for our business,  and to leverage as sales opportunities to prospective clients.  I will say however, that as a SaaS provider (back then it was called an Application Service Provider or ASP) – we quickly realized the gap in the market for real Managed Hosting Providers.  We tried absolutely everyone – and were shocked at the lack of managed services that were available – and how successful companies, while selling marginally managed services, were charging top dollar for the privalage of running your business off of their infrastructure.  We had decided to begin offering reseller solutions to customers and quickly realized that the market demand was huge, and we simply needed to be able to service these customers, provide real management services and the potential was endless.  Eventually, we opened our own NOC via a colocation presence, with our own hardware, our own staff and our own support philosophy – and well, the rest is history.  Cartika has grown at an exponential rate, and on a continual basis – year over year.  We currently support 1000′s of customers, with 100,000+ end users.  We own and operate millions of dollars worth of infrastructure, have a full team of resources including front line support staff, engineers, designers and programmers.  Honestly though, we are just getting started.  Our next objective is to take on the big boys in this industry, while still maintaining our business and mission objectives.  Challenging task, but, I am confident that myself and our team are up for the challenge.