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Rand · 10-09-2007, 02:32 PM

Quote:

2. How in the world did you come to be running one of the largest credit card processing companies for adult websites? Explain the journey.

First of all, I'm not running Epoch. I'm fortunate enough to be a part of a pretty amazing group of people who work like a well oiled machine.

But to speak for Epoch as a whole and our progression, well, I guess you could just say it was the right people at the right time with the right ideas. To explain somewhat about how we got here, the two guys who started Epoch are still owners of the company. Back in those days we didn't have titles on our business cards, but what would be the equivalent of a CTO was Joel Hall. And if you don't think that processing is akin to rocket science, let me just say that Joel came from NASA.

Joel hand coded our systems one line at a time from the ground up. And what he and his partner were able to do is the reason we exist today. A lot of people don't realize that Epoch was the first billing company to offer real time password management, provide real time stats, and launch an affiliate tracking and payment system. In fact, the success of our affiliate system (reseller program) nearly killed us. We had no way to anticipate the amount of volume we received very quickly. We were adding servers every week it seemed. Upgrading equipment daily. And taking a crash course in what fraud really meant. That was both exciting and scary but a test of fire. We came through it better off. Luckily, Joel is still alive to talk about it.

I think being the pioneer in these areas, with proprietary systems, was what sent us to the top with the growing legends of the early days.

The ride to where we are has been very interesting. We've learned and grown a lot as a company. And we've been fortunate to work with most of the pioneers and geniuses of this industry. There were some real shysters too, but that's a whole other bag of worms.