Mike Mollick
Name: Mike Mollick
Current Job: Manager, NeverBounce @ Zoominfo Powered by DiscoverOrg
Favorite restaurant in town? It's hard to pick just one, but I guess I'd say Barrio, with Choolah a close second.
Favorite thing about Cleveland? I love seeing how bike-friendly Cleveland has become, especially with the mixed-use trails. I can't wait to see the towpath and lakefront finally connected.
Q: Mike, you went to The Cleveland Institute of Art and studied Game Design. How did that influence your software development thought process? Going to CIA represented a massive shift in my personal development. As someone who did well with Math and Sciences in High School, I felt like a fish out of water going to art school. The Game Design is a more technically oriented program than many others at CIA, but it still required more conscious thought about the impact of our solutions and designs on a project. It shaped me to think less about technical implementation and more about how what I'm building will be interacted with and used — not only by end-users but also by other developers who inherit my projects.
Q: While at CIA, you started programming and got a job with a digital agency. How did you transition into programming while studying art school and getting a job at an agency? I was lucky enough to have grown up in the MySpace generation, so going into CIA, I already had a solid grasp on HTML and CSS. This ended up sticking with me through my teens, picking up some basic JavaScript along the way. While at CIA I had to make ends meet, knowing that web design was in demand. I eventually came across a job post for an "Interactive Design Intern" at The Form Group, and they gave me a chance. That was when I realized I like developing software and started thinking of myself as a software developer.
Q: While you worked for an agency, you eventually found yourself building NeverBounce, how did that happen? After a year with The Form Group, I ended up taking a job with another digital agency called Creavos. We had a lot of client work, mostly Wordpress, and a few custom applications, but we also worked on internal projects. These internal projects were the passion projects that we hoped we could pivot to as a full-time project. NeverBounce started as one of these internal projects after we managed to get banned from AWS SES by sending emails on behalf of a client with an old email list. There were other providers in the space, but none provided it at a price that would work on our budget. That's when we started to work on an email verification system that would eventually become NeverBounce.
Q: NeverBounce was sold earlier this year. Can you share what that process was like and how the company is doing post-acquisition? The acquisition process itself can be quite stressful and affect your day to day routine; this is especially true with a small team. Our CEO spent a lot of his time entertaining various venture capitalists and executives from other companies leading up to the acquisition. Eventually, we found some potential suitors, and the conversations became more in-depth. One of these suitors was DiscoverOrg (now ZoomInfo Powered by DiscoverOrg), and after several meetings, they eventually gave us a letter of intent. Once we accepted it, we dove into a grueling diligence process. Over several weeks, we had to comb through financials, usage data, and tech stack to meet the requirements. I can recall at least once where our CEO and I had a 1 AM call trying to finalize some cohort reports. It wasn't an easy process, but we eventually made it through, and by the end of it, we were DiscoverOrg employees.
Post-acquisition, we've remained a mostly independent team and product. There have been some behind the scenes work to tie our verification directly into their product, but we've remained focused on what we do best.
Q: How can Cleveland do a better job of getting more technical talent here?Cleveland needs more outreach and advocacy for the software and startup scenes here. As a historically working-class city, Cleveland isn't on the mind of a lot of software engineers and tech entrepreneurs. When I visit other cities, people are often surprised that we have any software and startup scenes at all.