Paul Sheng co-founded FoundHere, Inc in 2013. Previously, he was a partner at Bain & Company, an international strategy consulting firm, where he was a co-founder of the private equity group. Earlier in his career he worked at McKinsey & Company, in Hong Kong, helping multi-nationals develop growth strategies in the region. Paul has a BA, MA from Oxford University and an MBA from Stanford University. Founded in 2013, FoundHere.com enables users to easily build and maintain a fully functioning website for free, including design templates, hosting, and built-in search engine optimization. The intuitive website service offers hundreds of professionally designed templates that are organized by specific markets for easy selection, as well as search engine tools, drag and drop editing, and content customization through widgets and flexible content blocks.

BusinessInterviews.com: How did you come up with the concept behind FoundHere.com?

John O’Brien launched O’Brien Metal after 20 years in corporate America. Despite the difficult economic conditions, O’Brien Metal has profitably grown and established itself as a key player in this industry over the past six years. John O’Brien is a proven business builder, prior to joining Fair Isaac Corp. he was a founding member of Braun Consulting Inc. out of Chicago (Fair Isaac purchased Braun Consulting in 2004) and as a Sr. Leader helped grow the firm from five employees to over 600 – including an IPO in 1999 and market valuation of over $500 million.

Founded in Chicago, Illinois in 2007 O’Brien Metal is made up of digital & artisanal metal fabrication and renovation experts who understand the relationship between design and function, shape and finish. Together with some of the country’s most notable architects, designers, and landscape architects, they have been crafting beautiful interiors and striking exteriors throughout Chicago and New York. The company employs a diverse group of Architectural Detailers, Fabricators, Artists, Metal Technicians, Restorers, Finishing Experts, and Forging and Casting Professionals. They are experts at working with specialty metals such as bronze, brass, nickel, silver, gold leaf, copper, stainless steel, and aluminum. The company is also a member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Chicago, AIA New York, Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), American Institute of Conservators (A IC) and American Preservation Technology (APT).

BusinessInterviews.com: What inspired to your decision to leave your long and successful corporate career to launch O’Brien Metal?

Digital Third Coast (DTC) is an energetic and results-driven Chicago digital marketing agency founded in 2007 and located in Chicago’s Wicker Park/Bucktown neighborhood. They partner with their clients to create solid strategies that help them make the most of their online presence. As a digital marketing agency, they will evaluate the full spectrum of your business’ presence online and collaborate with you to develop and execute plans to help your business generate more website traffic, leads, brand awareness, customer loyalty, and sales. DTC offers the following services: SEO, Pay Per Click advertising (PPC), and content marketing.

BusinessInterviews.com: What key elements should a business keep in mind when it comes to determining their mobile SEO strategy?

DoNotRent.com was founded in 2011 by a group of real estate professionals in Chicago who have rented over the years from good and bad landlords. After performing market research and analysis they discovered a need for a national social networking apartment review site where users have the ability to review not only apartments but student housing and rental homes. Users can share reviews and apartment listings on their favorite social sites, send messages to reviewers and engage in a conversation about an apartment, bookmark listings and reviews, check rental data, inquire about apartment availability, obtain moving quotes and search for roommates via our partners site. They came out of beta November 2012 and launched a new user friendly social networking review platform.

DoNotRent.com is the first apartment review website where users can not only search or write reviews and ratings of apartments they rented from their computer but they also can search and write reviews of apartments they toured using their smartphone.

BusinessInterviews.com: How has your background in real estate help shape the vision and direction of DoNotRent.com?

Launched last year, the first Fetchnotes apps helped over 80,000 people keep track of notes and to do lists by organizing them with hashtags (rather than the typical bloated and complex tools otherwise available). Over the course of 2013, we noticed some really interesting trends around productivity and communication (details in the links). We felt like no one in this space was building tools that worked for people individually as well as they worked for people together. Products tend to be either “anti-social” (as Evernote calls themselves) or start with social and work backwards (most collaboration products, or even worse email). A group of 6 19-22 year-olds who graduated from Techstars (Boston Fall ’12) rather than college, we decided to build it ourselves.

Mike: Alex, lets start by talking about the new product. How is the new Fetchnotes different than the previous version… or other note taking apps that are available today? What are these trends you’re addressing that others are not?