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Interview with Kelly Anderson, CEO of Sendio

Our interview today is with Kelly Anderson, the new CEO of Sendio (www.sendio.com). Sendio is developing spam filtering technology based on verifying addresses of email senders. Anderson gave us some of his perspectives on the firm and his goals as the new CEO.

Ben Kuo: For the readers that aren't familiar with Sendio, what do you do?

Kelly Anderson: Sendio is an early stage startup that has been around since 2004, looking at the problems of solving spam and antivirus issues, as it applies to messaging systems. What these folks did is they took a contrarian view to the problem, and instead of following everyone else, stopped, paused, and took an objective look at the problem, how it is being addressed, and how to manage the problem. They came up with a way of solving the problem, as the anchoring tenet of their product strategy. That key concept is called sender address verification, and my assessment is that this is the single best solution to address solving the spam problem once and for all.

Ben Kuo: What's your background, and how'd you end up at Sendio?

Kelly Anderson: My background is I spent twenty three years at Nortel, and held a number of positions in sales, marketing, and corporate strategy. I went from Nortel to a small, boutique buy-side investment group, and from there went into a number of smaller companies, where I primarily assisted with sales and marketing strategy. Those companies included GoRemote, a managed security service provider for enterprises, and also went to a company that was backed by Sequoia Capital, IP3 Networks, which we just sold this August. I knew the folks at Momentum Ventures, found out about Sendio, and was interested in the company, which led to my appointment as CEO.

Ben Kuo: How far along is Sendio?

Kelly Anderson: We've got over 100 customers right now, operating in production. Our product, Sendio Icebox, is currently being sold, and we're actively recruiting partners right now. The reference-able accounts, customers who have deployed it, tell us that they are not getting any more spam, that we've shut the door on spam. From that aspect, it's been going extremely well. We've been selling the product for the better part of a year.

Ben Kuo: How does Sender Address Verification work?

Kelly Anderson: What it does, is when a message comes in an enterprise, before it hits the messaging server or has a chance to corrupt things, it has to be verified or validated. The novel process that Sendio has developed goes back and ensures that the party that sent the message is a legitimate sender; if not, it doesn't pass the message through at all.

Ben Kuo: What are some of your top priorities as the new CEO?

Kelly Anderson: Our immediate priorities are to build out the management team. We're hiring at all levels. We are looking for people in security, who understand messaging solutions and enterprise level security. We are looking at the market, and stratifying the market to optimize solutions for different customers and channel partners, as our product is very conducive for that kind of customization.

Ben Kuo: Thanks for the interview!