The Drive Home

All through grade school, Chris Schroeder was a solid C student—not because he couldn’t do the work, but because he lacked the motivation and drive to be exceptional at school. Without a passion, what was the point? He preferred to spend his time playing sports, working paper routes, and lifeguarding at the local pool. “I remember knowing that, at some point, I’d need to pick a career because that’s what people do in life,” he says today. “But I had no clear vision of what I wanted to do. I felt like the need to define my future was extrinsically motivated, and not my own.”

Having worked on his high school’s newspaper and the yearbook, Chris went to college thinking he might as well become a photojournalist major. As luck would have it, however, he attended a job fair during his first semester, where he had the opportunity to speak with people who had pursued the profession. When he asked what a typical career path looked like in that field, they laid out a long road with a series of gates that would need to be opened before he even began to see any real success. “I realized that, at the end of the day, my ability to advance forward would depend on the subjective criteria of taste, over which one has minimal control,” he remembers. “I wanted to have a sense of control in the process, so I began to rethink my options.”

Chris had dabbled in computer programming in high school and appreciated the fact that, unlike the art world’s subjective standards of good and bad, the world of technology was much more objective. “If your work doesn’t function, that means you did it wrong,” he says. “But if it does work, you did it right.” Working in technology promised tangible measures of success that linked directly to one’s skill levels, and that resonated with Chris. He decided to declare a computer science major, and with that decision, it was as if the floodgates opened. The uninterested student transformed into a driven, determined, passionate individual poised at the brink of a real future, marking one of the most defining moments of his life. Now the cofounder and CEO of App47, Inc., a startup that specializes in systems management for mobile apps to the enterprise, Chris has used entrepreneurship to expand the impact of that transformative realization so that, now, he builds businesses that allow others to achieve life-changing experiences of their own.

After unlocking his passion for computer science, Chris’s success could have taken any number of forms. He could have easily found a safe, stable, secure career working with the federal government or at a large corporation, if it weren’t for the drive home at the end of the day. “At the end of the day, on my drive home, I always ask myself, did I move the ball forward today?” Chris explains. “When you work for a large company, even if you’re putting in 80-hour weeks, the probability of your actions having an impact on the public stock price of your company is so negligible. I enjoy smaller, entrepreneurial startups where I can have an impact on a daily basis. As I go through my list and get through the day, I know I make a difference in moving the company forward, and that matters to me. There’s a lot of risk that comes with that, but at the end of the day, you have to believe in yourself and your ability to bounce back, even if things don’t go as planned.”

This willingness to take risks stands in contrast to the approach taken by Chris’s own father, who was a helicopter pilot for the Navy. Chris was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and the family moved once before settling in Virginia Beach when he was five years old. “It was important to my parents not to uproot my older brother, younger sister, and me,” he remembers. “So my father would go on deployment and rotate through the various jobs, squadrons, and roles, all while stationed in the same place.” After 22 years in the service, however, his father found he couldn’t progress any further because he hadn’t engaged in the hardship tours that are integral to rank promotions. “He made a conscious decision to give us a stable home, and who knows what would have happened otherwise,” Chris says, “But I know he would have liked to serve longer, and I was left with the impression that the safe route isn’t always the best route.”

In Chris’s household growing up, family always came first. His mother, a homemaker, was a religious woman, and both parents were extremely engaged in their children’s lives and in the community. “Everyone in our town knew our parents, so everyone knew the Schroeder kids,” Chris laughs. “If we went out and got into trouble, the news would get home before we did. So, because of that engagement and involvement, and because our parents were so present in our lives, we weren’t tempted by some of the things the other kids were doing. We were good kids.”

Despite this involvement and support, the Schroeders encouraged independence in their children, which frustrated Chris when he entered high school and found himself faced with bigger decisions that would shape the course of his life. Being forced to make his own decisions, however, cultivated in him a sense of self-reliance and confidence that grew through the years and would become particularly important toward the end of his college career at Radford University, as he struggled through 400-level computer science and mathematics courses. “As I was approaching the end of my studies, I considered the idea of joining the military and flying helicopters like my father,” he remembers. “But I had made the decision to invest four years of my life in figuring out this field called computer science, so I stood by that choice.”

A professor had told Chris that computer science is a trade, and that he would be charged with going out in the world and figuring out a domain where he could apply his skills and become an expert. Upon graduating and beginning his pursuit of that domain, he hoped to become a user interface programmer, but was lured into accepting a systems management position at a government contracting firm. “It was a blessing in disguise, because the systems management domain is perfect for me,” he affirms. “It’s relevant and lucrative, and it’s something I understand and am passionate about. That was a career-defining twist of fate.”

With that, Chris became a systems administrator, and over the next eight years working in the government contracting world, he learned how to manage servers, build and manage networks, and detect and address security intrusions. He built small networks and large network operation centers for three letter organizations, earning security clearances and eventually returning to school to earn his masters in telecommunications engineering.

Chris then left the government contracting world behind when he accepted a position at UUNET, one of the largest internet service providers at the time. In that capacity, he helped build and manage their system manager platforms. “With one of the largest networks in the world, there were tons of devices that needed to be monitored,” he recalls. “We needed to collect all the events that were occurring and channel them into a manageable view that would allow us to determine if the network was healthy, and to troubleshoot any problems.” Working on a team of around 60 people spread between the U.S., the UK, and Amsterdam, Chris spent four years there, and during that time, he met two people that would change the course of the rest of his life.

One was Kim, the friend of a friend that Chris met one evening at a group dinner at Plaza America in Reston. They were playing word and number games on the paper tablecloth, and someone wrote down a series of numbers that Kim readily identified as a famous sequence of numbers that links directly to the golden ratio. “We always joke now that she had me at ‘Fibonacci series,’” Chris smiles. “We got married in 1999, and I couldn’t have done all of this without her. She’s always been supportive and has focused on what makes me happy.”

Also at UUNET, Chris met Sean McDermott, the CEO of Windward IT Solutions. UUNET hired Windward to help Chris’s team build its system management tools. Sean was heavily involved in the startup world, and Chris decided to leave UUNET to try his hand at a startup himself. With that, he took a job as the VP of Engineering at Statusphere and was charged with building a new product. “We hit every engineering milestone we laid out—on time, feature complete, fully tested,” he recounts. “It was awesome, but we closed the company doors because the sales and marketing weren’t aligned with the product. The lesson learned was that engineering is the easy part; it’s sales and marketing that are hard, and those areas are where investment dollars should be channeled.”

Closing Statusphere’s doors marked a particularly poignant time in Chris’s life. He remembers vividly standing outside the hospital the day after his first son was born, on the phone discussing who would pay the lawyers to close the company since there was no money left in its bank account. Chris wasn’t sure how he would get his next paycheck, but he was coming to understand that stability is the product of one’s network and capabilities, more than anything else. What’s more, he had been wholly bitten by the startup bug. “Even the late nights, hard work, pain, suffering, and sacrifice of the Statusphere experience was fun to me,” he remarks. “I knew I was an entrepreneur at heart.”

Chris went on to serve as the CTO of a company called Approva and then left in 1992 to launch Vanward Technologies with Andy Glover, the current CTO of App47. Vanward was a bootstrap consulting company focused on automated software testing and could reduce the platform development cycle of their clients by weeks, or even months. Sean McDermott then asked Chris to come to Windward and help productize a piece of intellectual property, which spun off into its own company, RealOps, Inc. The company automated the troubleshooting and recovery of failed systems and was sold to BMC Software in 2007, resulting in an exceptional exit that generated a three-fold return for its investors in less than three years. “That’s one of the business ventures I’m most proud of,” says Chris, who was the company’s CTO.

The day after the RealOps check cleared, Chris and Sean asked, “What’s next?” They had had enough of enterprise’s software sells and wanted to do something in the consumer market. Chris served on BMC’s M&A team until 2009, when a severance package became available. Ready to leap into entrepreneurship again, he took his chance, and he and Sean began pitching a number of consumer-based product ideas. “Everyone said we were two enterprise software guys who didn’t understand the consumer space, so we decided to figure it out ourselves,” he says. With that, they built several mobile apps to serve as testing platforms to understand how the consumer-based market worked. “After making them available to the public and analyzing the data, we concluded that, yes, we were two enterprise software guys who didn’t understand the consumer space. But we learned a lot about mobility!” Chris laughs.

The process led to a key realization: it wouldn’t be hard to instrument an app to report who was using it, where, and how, as well as how it was performing, where it was crashing, and why. “These are answers I’d want to know for any IT asset,” Chris points out. “There were no system management tools for mobile apps, so we returned to a space where we were well-versed. We went back to the Series A investors who had funded RealOps, though we didn’t have a line of code written. They funded two guys and an idea.”

With that, App47 was born in January of 2011. A product was built by June, and almost three years later, they have just over thirty customers, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Air Force, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Bristol Myers. The company now sits at the inflection point of any seed-stage startup, poised for the market to take off. With its main office in Reston, and with a team of ten employees, it helps to deploy, configure, and secure apps, moderate their performance, detect their faults, and measure their usage—often for companies who have written the app for internal employee use to streamline business practices.

A pure technologist at heart, Chris aspires to serve as the CTO of a publicly traded company, and as his first CEO role, his experiences at App47 have been a perfect stepping stone toward that vision. From running a sales team, to negotiating partnership deals, to working with lawyers, to conducting federal, Fortune 500, and international sales, his business acumen and technological expertise combine to lend him an intuitive sense of how to provide the best value to the customer at the lowest cost to the company, and how to build the right product at the right time for the market.

But for Chris, the most gratifying aspect of leading startups to success is the creation of opportunity and jobs in an economy where both are lacking. “I love finding people who, based on their resume, are unqualified to do what they want to do,” says Chris. “I believe they should have a chance, and I like to give them that opportunity. It’s about seeing the character and potential of a person, rather than letting their experience limit them. I love taking someone fresh out of college, or someone who wants to switch career fields, and giving them the support they need to follow their passion. When they fail, we teach them how to correct their errors and watch them grow. I like to build companies that create opportunities for people to come in and grow themselves.” In advising young people entering the working world today, Chris emphasizes the importance of finding something that speaks to one’s passion, and to be prepared to work hard for it once you find it.

Chris and Kim work to create a similar atmosphere at home for their four children. Beyond teaching them right, wrong, and the nuance of a good moral compass, they’ve founded a charity called Majomani—a name comprised from the first two letters of each child’s name. “We haven’t decided whether the mission will focus on education or on more humanitarian concerns, but we’ve begun to build it as a way for our family to give back together as a unit,” Chris says. “To me, family is the most important thing—I don’t know what I’d do without them.”

Now, on the drive home each night to the family he cherishes so much, Chris doesn’t have to wonder if he moved the ball forward that day. For the App47 team and clients, for the people given a chance to achieve their goals because of opportunities he’s created, for the children he’s raising, and for his own future, it seems Chris continues at a steady jog, keeping that ball in play and never letting it rest.

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