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About
Hi. I’m an entrepreneur and software engineer.
I’m also the former founder & CEO of Imagely.
I’m passionate about my business, engineering, family, and Colorado.
New Chapter
After 10 great years, Imagely (along with Photocrati) was acquired in 2020. I want to say thanks to the Imagely team. We put together a wonderful group of people, and many of us worked together for nearly 10 years. It was like family. Thanks for sharing a big slice of life with me.
I’m now working on our next projects. We still run ShowThemes, which makes WordPress event themes. And we just launched a new brand, WPRealEstate, which makes WordPress real estate themes.
Imagely
Imagely makes provides web solutions for photographers. The company is best known for NextGEN Gallery, the most popular WordPress gallery plugin ever with over a million active users.
Imagely is like Squarespace for photographers, but built on WordPress. If you are photographer building on the WordPress platform, we have everything you need from hosting to themes to galleries to ecommerce.
I founded Imagely in 2009 and ran it for 10 years. It was a great chapter of life, and continues to build outstanding products.
PHILANTHROPY
Imagely has always had a strong philanthropic focus. In total, we gave away over $50,000 between 2009 and 2020 to support humanitarian and environment photography projects through the Imagely Fund. Judges for the Fund include some of the best known environmental and cultural photographers in the world, including Steve McCurry, Nick Nichols, Art Wolfe, and Jim Brandenburg.
OTHER BACKGROUND
I graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Marquette business school in 1998, worked as a project manager at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management in Washington DC, and then spent way too long in graduate school (two Masters degrees in Applied Economics and Political Science, PhD in Political Science). I was a two-time Fulbright fellow in Indonesia.
While in Indonesia, I took a break from graduate school to work as photojournalist covering humanitarian, environmental, and cultural stories in Indonesia for OnAsia, a leading provider of Asian editorial imagery based in Singapore and Bangkok, and for HDNet, a leading provider of high definition television in the United States.
I covered diverse stories including orangutan rehabilitation in Sumatra, Komodo dragons, illegal logging in Borneo, Bromo Tengger National Park, the life of a Mentawai shaman clan in Siberut, the Baliem Festival in Papua, the Pasola festival in Sumba, the eruption of Mount Merapi in Java, protests and floods in Jakarta, and dozens of other stories. Credits and clients included Asian Geographic, the BBC, Conde Naste Traveler, the Indonesian Department of Forestry, the Sydney Herald, Reader’s Digest, the University of Wisconsin, the Wall Street Journal, Yale University, and many others.
I came home in 2007 and wrapped up my PhD in 2008. Academia proved too esoteric, so I joined the United States Foreign Service (diplomatic corps / US State Dept) and was assigned to the be the US Economic Officer in the Republic of Congo. I continue to have a great degree of respect for the US State Department, and especially for the 139th Foreign Service Officer class. But the environment and emphasis there did not fit with my own vision.
So I moved to Colorado with my family and starting Imagely in 2009.
I ran Imagely for 10 years. Other than a couple hard years at the beginning to get off the ground, we grew and were profitable every year. We built a team that was both talented and close knit. I also developed a love of software development. I now have mid-level skills in PHP and modern Javascript.
Not coincidentally, starting Imagely also allowed me to move to Boulder, Colorado, one of the best places in the world to live.
Imagely was just acquired in 2020. I’ve launched some new projects, and I’m working on my next chapter now.
So that’s the scoop. Thanks for visiting!
Erick