Its founder is an experienced entrepreneur.
Chris Charuhas is the founder and CEO of Dyadic. He started out in entrepreneurship in the 1990s as a member of the Netpreneur Exchange, one of the first tech startup incubators. There he learned new-product marketing from AOL co-founder Jim Kimsey, Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, and other luminaries of the dot-com era.
In the late 1990s he started his first company, Usable Technology. Like many entrepreneurs’ first efforts, it failed, but the experience taught him the value of following the Customer Development process, which involves discovering, validating, creating, then serving a startup’s paying customers.
Chris started his second company, Visibooks, in 2000. It published illustration-based technology how-to books, and sold them online as downloadable files. To adapt the books for school use, he won two SBIR grants from the US Dept. of Education for $570K. When he found the school market tough to crack, he turned the books into online tutorials.
In 2008, he released the tutorials under a new brand, In Pictures. He launched it with an earned media campaign that took its web site from 0 to 250,000 unique visitors per month in three months. By the time he sold the In Pictures web site in 2014, its online tutorials had been used by more than seven million people worldwide.
Its branding expert has 30 years’ experience.
Jason Feaga is a founding equity partner in Dyadic, a board member, and its branding expert. He is the founder of J&MAIN, a branding agency that provides brand strategy planning, web and social media content execution, and campaign performance review.
Before Jason founded J&MAIN in 2018, he founded 18 Visions Design, an award-winning marketing agency, in 2006. His firm created and managed the launch of 75 web sites, and its own site was named “Best Business to Business Website” by Smart Company Magazine.
Jason has marketing and design experience in the corporate world that goes back to 1996. He has worked as a graphic designer for Phoenix Mecano, Director of Marketing for Superior Specialty Supply, and Digital Marketing Manager for the Frederick Regional Health System.
Its board will be experienced as well.
As Dyadic raises its seed funding from angel investors, it’s not only seeking investment, it’s looking for “smart money.” That is, investors who have started successful companies themselves, who’d like to serve on this company’s board of directors and help guide it.
A good example is Mike Markkula, the former marketing manager for Intel, whose stock options enabled him to retire at 33. He came out of retirement in 1977 to make a $90K angel investment in Apple Computer, then served as its original chairman of the board.
