Alumni Juggle Tech Companies
Two W&L alumni and their burgeoning business are the subject of a nice profile in the Nov. 25 edition of the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat. Stephanie Leffler and husband Ryan Noble, both of Washington and Lee’s Class of 2000, co-founded Juggle.com, which serves as an umbrella for companies CrowdSource, RIOmedia and ClickableNames.com.
The piece describes how the couple first joined forces while they were students at W&L, forming an Internet services provider. They started Monster Commerce in 2002, sold it three years later, and founded Juggle.com in 2009. Ryan is the president of Juggle.com, while Stephanie is the CEO of CrowdSource.
And they are not the only W&L alumni on board: their classmate Dave Levinson is the CFO of Juggle.com.
Their headquarters in Swansea, Ill., must be a fun place to work. The reporter describes how visitors “walk past models of characters from Star Wars and into an office where the Simpsons sit and Spiderman hangs from the wall. Parked inside CrowdSource’s office is a bright purple and yellow race car with Juggle.com’s logo on it that the company sponsored in the NASCAR Nationwide Series Race in 2009.” The company also provides snacks, an exercise room, a pool table and a flat-screen TV for its employees’ enjoyment.
As Stephanie explained in the article, “If you build a space like this, it will just inspire people to come in and be more productive. . . . You could have the greatest software in the world, but if you don’t have a team of people who are not committed to helping you win, it’s very difficult to get what you need to be done.”
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