Welcome To The Official Team Brazen Blog

It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally launched the official Team Brazen Blog. After a year of telling companies how important it is for them to blog, we figured we would drink the Kool-aid and start one too.

Most of the team has a unique online identity. And as Dan Schawbel would tell you, that’s great for personal branding. But we also need a collective voice from the company. People want to know what’s new at Brazen headquarters, where we’re headed in the future and why we’re doing what we’re doing. So this will be the place to find all the latest Brazen gossip.

At Brazen, everyone has a unique job (in most cases, multiple jobs) and a unique personality.

Ryan Paugh, our Community Manager/Editor/Fill in Designer, loves talking to people. In fact, Ryan genuinely wants to be friends with every single person on our network. I often wonder how he’ll do this when we have a million users, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he finds a way. Ryan is determined to showcase as many community members as humanly possible through his community member Q&A’s. I’m sure he’ll also write about life as an online Community Manager – the coolest new job around.

Dan Healy, our Sales Ninja/Corporate Community Manager/Social Chair, wants to close deals and build relationships. You can find him on the phone for hours a day making calls and signing companies up to the network. He also likes to party, you can’t blame him; he’s less than a year out of college. Dan will give you some intimate details about the companies joining the network through his company profiles and Q&As. If we’re lucky, he may even tell us about his crazy nights at the Great Dane.

Photis Patriotis, our Development Manager/Entire Development Team, desperately wants to manage. The problem is, we’re five person show and there is no one for him to manage. So he makes it happen anyway by outsourcing his work to Ecuador and not telling anyone. He also happens to have the strangest name anyone has ever heard, but that’s a whole different post. The truth is, Photis is really good at his job. He’s managed large rollouts for us and he will share what he’s learned about technical management, Drupal, and start-up life as a tech dude.

Penelope Trunk, our CEO/Celebrity blogger and author, loves to blog and loves to talk on the phone. You can find her in the office two to three times a month if you’re lucky. And when she’s there she’s either focused intensely on her current blog post or yelling at some unlucky soul on the phone. Hopefully she’ll be providing some interesting anecdotes about life at a start-up in Madison WI with four twenty-something guys, but I can’t make any promises. We’ll do our best to pull her away from life as a hot shot web celebrity. Of course, you can always find her ranting about something on her personal blog.

As for me, our Finance/Marketing /Fill in Sales Guy, I like to tell people what to do. I always have a new idea and I always know just the person to execute on the idea. The problem is, everyone is doing a million other things and no one can take on more work. So I spend most of my time developing strategies and plans and bothering people in their offices. I also spend way more time than I’d like arguing with Penelope about how to best manage the little money we have. I’ll be writing about new features we release, why we released them and what our plans for the future are.

This blog will evolve as the company moves forward and we add new team members and try out new business models. A start-up is a rollercoaster, it’s never static, and that’s what makes it so interesting. This blog will reflect that same attitude, we’re always open to new ideas. If you guys want to hear anything in particular from us, or if you have ideas for types of posts you’d like to see, please let us know and we’ll do our best to please.