10 Years of Savas Labs, Part 1 - The People

Here we are, ten years into the Savas Labs journey and I’m gobsmacked. If you didn’t land here from our celebratory microsite, go check it out! 

I try to remind myself daily to count my many blessings. Having had the opportunity to work alongside, and to serve the amazing people I have via Savas has been one of the greatest privileges of my life so far. I am very people and purpose oriented, so I tend to think in those lenses. Given that, there are some people I’d like to thank, and reflections I’d like to share.

Clearly attempting to do justice to thank all of those deserving of recognition over a decade is an exercise in futility. However, not making an attempt seems the worse of two imperfect options. Regardless, I carry endless gratitude to those who have supported and grown us along the way, mentioned by name or not.

Randy Fay: Going back to the pre-Savas days, I’ll start by giving a huge shoutout to Randy, a giant in the open source software engineering community, and more impressively to me, the founder of an amazing international touring cycling community called Warmshowers.org— a service that I used on several long-distance bike trips, including a cross-U.S. journey. Randy is a highly skilled engineer, but more than that, embodies incredible generosity—the quality I admire most. He was an inspiration on many fronts earlier in my career and was instrumental in helping build my client network early on after my first failed startup in Boston, which the pursuit of that startup was how I met Randy to begin with.

Greg Go of Killer Aces was my first client as a freelancer. He took a risk on me, and we worked together for nearly ten years. I had set a goal to pay off my student loans before leaving Boston for Durham, NC, which I was able to achieve because of him. Greg would frequently nudge as an early advocate “you know, you should really run your own company” which allowed the thought to percolate more seriously over time. 

Ben Baumann: Ben Baumann was an owner, and the person who first hired me at Isovera. As I made the transition to full-time freelancer when leaving Boston, after a year at Isovera, I continued to provide them services in a freelance capacity. This helped provide stability and security while I was (unwittingly) starting to build Savas Labs. 

Dan Murphy was the first person I hired once I had more work than I could handle individually. We met through pickup soccer in Boston—we like to joke that we met on Craigslist, which was where the game was posted, so it is true. Dan was going through a career transition, and we invested in each other. I trained Dan on the engineering work I was doing, and while there was give and take, work predictability in the earliest days required patience and flexibility from Dan. The fact that Dan is still with Savas in a Lead Engineer / AI Strategist role is certainly a testament to those qualities; he’s survived me for 10 years. 😘 I love you friend. 

Kosta Harlan: Dan and I worked together in this capacity for about a year, and a confluence of events would bring Savas Labs to fruition. I met another person through soccer, this time in Durham, Kosta Harlan. Although I initially saw him as a potential competitor, a fateful brunch after a game near Duke’s campus revealed that we shared many interests and complementary engineering skills. Over a few months of discussion, Kosta would join the team as our Technical Director which was required for our burgeoning team of smart and talented people in need of training and support. This gave the space for me to step out and work to build the business. I’m proud to say Kosta and Anne Tomasevich, also on the team at the outset, are both in engineering leadership roles at Wikipedia, and have been for many years as their next steps from Savas.

Katie Persons is a friend I met through Dan who was instrumental in helping us to find and win a large (for us at the time) engagement with MIT, which allowed me to step out of an engineering role and become full-time business builder. It also helped us move to full-time employment for the initial cadre of really smart folks: Dan, Kosta, Anne, and Tim Stallmann.

Ellen Cross and Bill Trippe, two of our main partners at MIT, trusted us early with a lot of diverse and successful projects at MIT. Thanks for believing in us.  

Brendan Ward took me through a branding/identity for the first time, which resulted in the name Savas and our first logo. He did so on a friend’s budget that was well below his paygrade.

Erin Fogel, a former colleague at Isovera, introduced us to another early and impactful client Omega Institute -- with whom we ended up doing more than 50 projects with and are still a client today. Deep thanks to the leadership at Omega who invested in us over the years: Joel Levitan, Laurie Hunt, Skip Backus, and Carla Goldstein. 

Blyth Morrell, now Assistant VP of Marketing and Brand Strategy at Duke, has been influential there as long as we’ve known her. Blyth has been responsible for innumerable introductions and saw the potential in us early that has led to over 20 projects with Duke over the decade that we’ve known each other. It did take us a while to get over the common rejection early on of “but no one has worked with you yet. We really loved you, though. Sorry!” I’m sure in no small part of her confidence in our team’s abilities.

Andrea Lemon of Building Green gave me the most impactful piece of feedback from a budget negotiation standpoint that shaped how to get to a win-win place based on fairness. I’m not sure I told her back then (I have now).  

Ben Eckerson, my only partner in the history of Savas joined me in 2018, and among many things, was the driving force behind us developing UX and design services. We’re unrecognizable today with where we were pre-Ben. With this development, Ben brought on our two earliest designers, Sean and Drew, who have left an indelible mark on the identity of Savas and why people seek us out. We’re grateful they’re all still with us today. Ben also brought operational and process experience from other larger and more established agencies which allowed us to more rapidly mature processes on a number of fronts that have served us ever since. If you didn’t catch it, read his announcement about his move to Chief Client Officer.

I'll share more reflections about our mission, vision, innovation, and impact in part two. Stay tuned!