Jay Laabs never envisioned he'd run his own company. Oddly enough, he always dreamed that he'd work at a big firm, but "coming out of college, none of those places wanted to hire me so I ended up working for a small software company of about 40 people," he says.
"Because it was a small firm, I was exposed to a lot of different aspects of the business—marketing, product development and sales—even though I was a project manager. The owner pulled me in to help in all of these other areas and I got to have input into various aspects of the business."
Hyperion bought that software firm and few years later, Laabs and "a few of us who just weren't willing to wait our turn," left to launch Blue Stone International in 2005. At Hyperion, one of Laabs' clients was General Electric. One of those GE clients became a co-founder of Blue Stone. "The two of us getting together is sort of why we are here today," he says. "He brought some big company mentality and his pedigree helped round out some of the areas we needed to get off the ground."
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