The Blazing Cloud team has joined forces with Indiegogo, in support of their mission to democratize crowdfunding. Since the company started in 2009, we have cultivated a multidisciplinary product-centric practice focused on providing value to early stage entrepreneurs and Fortune 500s. We are delighted to team up with Indiegogo as they dive into their next phase of growth.

Our former CEO, Stacia Carr is co-founding a new startup, currently working in stealth mode. She notes that “Blazing Cloud set a high bar that any organization I build or join will benefit from — its emphasis on top-notch engineering and design practices, diverse culture and extensive customer engagement is just the fuel necessary for products, services and companies to rocket to success.” Stacia is excited to roll up her sleeves and build a business and product from the ground up.

The Blazing Cloud experiment has been a delightful success. What started as a solo consulting foray almost five years ago became a thriving company in less than a year. I created a practice of agile business development, focusing just enough on the business side to achieve our greater goals. Joined by co-founder Lee Lundrigan and partner Jen-Mei Wu, we valued community involvement and creating great software products. As it turned out, those values fueled our commercial success.

The market led us to focus on mobile. Our passion for creating great products led us to develop a process that integrates agile development and lean startup practices, plus all of our combined experience with what works. Based on the suggestion from one of our clients, we called our process “the Blazing Path” — still a work in progress, I’ve posted our most recent slide deck to share with you all:

We set out to create the environment that we wanted to work in — with a diverse, creative group. Silicon Valley startups often complain about the lack of women engineers. Blazing Cloud diversity went beyond its 50-50 gender-balance. With a focus on mobile — both native and mobile web — we never exclusively recruited for particular technical skills. We looked for sharp engineers with a demonstrated ability to learn quickly, then we would teach them through pairing or give them time to learn whatever new tech was needed for the next project. None of us were expert in mobile when we started. We knew Java, Ruby, Smalltalk, Javascript, C, and variety of other languages — diversity is not just what you look like.

I remain focused on my work as a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution through the end of this year. In January, I’ll figure out what’s next for me.

Sarah Allen
Blazing Cloud Founder