Ed Shull, Founder and Chief Executive Officer

My name is Ed, and I am the founder and CEO of USWeb. When not working on USWeb projects, I still spend a lot of my time online playing poker, scrolling through YouTube or blogging. One of the things that make me good at my job is that I'm a true geek.

When I do manage to pull myself away from my Mac, I enjoy spending time with my son, playing poker, watching movies, and going to concerts. I also love traveling. In the past year I have gone to Hong Kong and Costa Rica. My favorite places to travel are Las Vegas and Austin. I also love film festivals.

I started working on my own small web projects in 1996. I spent my free time being inspired by authors like Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin. In 1999 I made the big move to Silicon Valley. My initial jobs were in the customer service space, mostly working with CRM systems like Octane and Siebel, but my interests always seemed to take me back to marketing. During my time in the Bay Area I worked at a lot of "hot new start-up" companies; Homewarehouse.com, BBQ.com, Achieva, etc... I decided to take a break from the dot com's and took a short lived position at Morgan Stanley as an analyst, but that didn't seem to fit either.

An amazing thing about the Bay Area is that no matter how much the job market dries up, the prices keep increasing. So when the bubble burst, I retreated to the lower cost of Phoenix, where I decided that I needed to start my own company. So while sleeping on the floor of my mothers spare room at nearly 30 years old, I bought a domain name, ClickSquad.com. I was working at a small PPC search engine, MyGeek.com as a sales rep. The owner of the company, Chad Little, was gracious enough to let me spend some of my time working on my own projects, and before too long I had a few clients of my own. I left MyGeek and started working on my new new venture. Along the way I attracted a few friends to Click Squad, and started making rounds at industry trade shows.

We mostly dealt with contextual media like WhenU and Gator. Many of the people that joined the company were from a fairly well known SEO firm. So we naturally moved in that direction. After a year of success with high profile clients (Forbes.com, ProFlowers, Playboy, etc...) I decided that we needed a brand lift. The Click Squad name didn't fit with our growing client base and service offering. I was fortunate enough to acquire one of the biggest brands in our space, USWeb.

My position at USWeb allows me to do some incredible things. I often speak at conferences like ad:tech and SXSW. I got to meet personal heroes like Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin and even Robert Kyosaki. And I got to meet new role models like Tim Ferriss and Jim Coudal. I also get to work on some great projects for innovative companies. I was even featured in the book Online Marketing Heroes by Michael Miller.

One of the added perks of running my own company is that I get to work from home. USWeb is primarily run from my home in Ashland, OR. where I live with my son Michael. As for my education, I started off strong by starting college at 14 years old, but eventually dropped out to work and travel. If your interested in learning more about me, you can check out my personal blog at www.filthylucre.com. Feel free to contact me anytime.