This week, we celebrated FMYI’s eighth anniversary. I started the company on January 28th because in Chinese, eight is good luck. I can still remember that first morning working out of Urban Grind Coffeehouse here in Portland’s Pearl District, which became FMYI HQ for much of the first year. Urban Grind owner Kevin Crawford created a thriving coffee shop for artists, knowledge workers, and the tech community in Portland. The irony is I don’t really drink coffee. I soon became a “social coffee drinker.“
The goal from day one was to start as a bootstrapped company and focus on revenue, not raising external capital. I’m proud that thanks to the efforts of our team, we became profitably early on, but it wouldn’t have been possible without a little bit of money my grandmother left me when she passed away. Recently, I spoke at the Net Impact conference on a panel called, “Not your Grandma’s CEO.“ I first had to confess to the crowd that I am my grandma’s CEO because her values are integrated into FMYI’s culture (resourcefulness, continuous improvement, helping others, being creative).
One of the early decisions was a name for the company. The original inspiration for “FMYI” came from all the emails flying around with “FYI” (an abbreviation of “for your information”). Wouldn’t it be easier to just post it in a centralized place instead of emailing it around? Unfortunately, “FYI” was already trademarked. So we came up with FMYI (pronounced “F-MY-I”) which is “for my innovation” because it’s about what all of us can do to spur innovation, not just share information. So now you know the story. And knowing is half the battle!
Eight years has gone by quickly. Back in 2004, we were one of the first pioneers with the idea of combining a social networking site with tools for collaboration. The vision was to make the software easy to use, offer tools to get things done, host the platform in the cloud so clients didn’t need additional IT help, provide free customer support, and embed the triple bottom line (people, planet, and profit) into our business model. To this day, we are still focused on these things.
They say it takes a village to raise a child. It definitely takes a community to grow a startup. The team here at FMYI would like to thank our clients, contractors, vendors, community partners, friends, family, and everyone who has helped us along the way. We’re looking forward to celebrating with you as we embark on our eighth year together!
Onward and upward,
-Justin
FMYI played a role in several ways. The planning team managed the conference using our 
During the panel I moderated featuring Wanda Gibson (Chief Technology Officer, Fairfax, Virginia County Government), John Tuccillo (Vice President, Global Industry and Government Alliances, Schneider Electric), and Tamim Chowdhury (Realty Specialist, U.S. General Services Administration), everyone focused in on measuring the impact of their efforts. Wanda talked about a “Just Do It” attitude with identifying opportunities to be more efficient and save money. Her efforts won an InfoWorld Green 15 Award for Virtualization and PC power management. John talked about how within a short period of time they were able to save $15,000 annually by cutting energy usage 20% for a 2500 square foot EPA data center. He estimates that there’s $1.1 billion in energy savings opportunities in the U.S. with similarly-sized data centers. And Tamim covered the GSA’s efforts to reduce the footprint of federal office space through space planning and teleworking to achieve 
