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Profile article

Interview with Anthony Morelli

by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright October 2015

Introduction

This is a profile article for my English 2080 Creative Nonfiction class.

Article

High tech can be an exciting and rewarding business. Utah is blessed with having its fair share of such enterprises.

One of these is Lucid Software and one of the people who is making an exciting and rewarding career there is Anthony Morelli, a Product Manager at Lucid working with Lucidchart. Lucidchart is a popular diagramming application. As Anthony, and the company, put it, "It's like Visio for the Mac."

Prior to joining Lucid, he worked as a product manager for Adobe Analytics. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from MIT, where he helped teach user-centric product design and expand the Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program. Anthony loves to cook delicious meals and have adventures in the mountains with his girlfriend and their dog.

Anthony Morelli

Anthony Morelli

 

Lucid Software is now located on the top floor of River Park 2, an office building on South River Front Parkway in South Jordan. Lucid got its start in 2010 when it was founded by Ben Dilts and Karl Sun. Both are still with the company, and it has been doubling in size for the last five years. It now employs over 100 people and has won a number Utah- and high technology-oriented business awards. These include:

o being recognized as a Top 25 Under 5 company by Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum
o being named an Emerging Elite business by MountainWest Capital Network
o being awarded Best Company to Work For by Utah Business Journal

all these in 2014.

River Park 2

Lucid Software is located here, top floor.

 

I wanted to talk with Anthony about what made his job exciting and rewarding. When I came to the office I found it to be contemporary high tech in decor -- the main office space was open, not cubicled, with spacious windows on one side, big Lucid logos on two others, and meeting rooms on the fourth side. We talked in one of the meeting rooms.

 

Roger -- Anthony, give me some background on what you do here. Tell me a bit about Lucid, the company, and Lucidchart, the product, and your role.

Anthony -- The dream that got Lucid started was making a Visio-like product in the browser with built-in support for collaboration. Microsoft makes Visio, but just for the Windows environment, and working together on a Visio document means emailing a file around. Lucid makes Lucidchart, which is something similar, for all environments -- Mac, apps, any device that can bring up a web browser -- and any number of people can open the same Lucidchart document at the same time and work together. I'm helping Lucidchart get better for all environments, particularly mobile ones.

Roger -- Tell me about a time when you got surprised: You had a Plan A in mind, but the real world surprised you, and out of it came a Plan B.

Anthony -- Yeah, this kind of thing is what keeps this work interesting. And now that you mention it, this happened to me just recently.

We were developing Lucidchart for Apple's latest iPad OS. Plan A was to design this app to work on the iPad and release it in August of this year.

The surprise came when some of Lucid's people talked to some Apple people at the WWDC conference in June, and the Apple people got interested. (WWDC = World Wide Developers Conference) What the Apple folk said was something like, "Design this for both the iPad and the iPhone, and we can get this to be a featured app at our September new OS announcement."

Whew! Delay our announcement a month, but add a whole new product line. Lots of extra work, and extra workers, to meet that deadline, but we did. In addition to just working on the iPhone the new app supports in-app purchasing and multi-tasking.

That was Plan B. And it seems to have paid off. LucidChart as a featured app got thousands of downloads in September instead of the hundreds we were anticipating for our August release. And Lucid Software now has some valuable networking connections in the Apple infrastructure.

Anthony Morelli

Here are some objectives we achieved:

o 3-4,000 downloads a day in September (instead of 300 or so)
o We got listed in 8 categories in 99 countries -- about 300 placements total
o We reached #9 in popularity on the App Store home page

And now some people at Apple are paying attention to Lucid.

Roger -- Most impressive! Now... are these downloads sales?

Anthony -- Not sales. This is all promotion success, so far. The apps are downloaded for free. The revenue [crosses fingers] comes when people are using the apps for things which Lucid charges for. An example of this would be converting back and forth between Lucid file format and Visio file format. That feature users pay for.

Roger -- Why would they pay for that?

Anthony -- Its a way of getting Visio files working on a Mac.

Roger -- Ah... that makes sense.

OK. To review: Plan A was to make Lucidchart for just the iPad and release it in August. The surprise was when Apple offered to help on promoting if Lucidchart was released for both the iPad and iPhone at their conference in September. And Plan B was to hustle a lot more developing time and effort to make that happen. And it did.

Anthony -- That's right.

Roger -- And in this case the reward for doing so was "ten X" the promotion response that you had been planning on getting. (ten x = ten times)

Anthony -- You got it.

Roger -- A nice reward, indeed.

Anthony -- And that's the kind of thing that makes this job so satisfying. It mixes innovative work with surprises, and when things work out well, a nice reward.

Roger -- Anthony, thank you for your time. And good luck on your next round of plans and surprises.

 

Anthony Morelli

The view from the office.

 

 

Epilog

As I walked out from the interview and through the Lucid offices, I reflected on just how surprising high tech always is. You can never grow up wishing to be an [X] if you're going into high tech, because [X] doesn't exist yet. When my father was growing up fiberglass didn't exist yet. When I was growing up personal computers didn't exist yet. When Anthony was growing up smart phones didn't exist yet.

I further mused.

This is the heart of the excitement of high tech when you are a young person. It is the curse when you get to be an old person because so much of that expertise you work so hard at developing becomes obsolete so quickly -- in just a few years time. I first became an expert in CP/M and MSDOS-based personal computers, then I became an expert in PC-based Local Area Networks, then I became an expert in designing HTML-based Internet web sites. In all of the above I discovered that every year about 30% of my expertise became obsolete -- what I knew just didn't matter any more. As a young person the excitement of mastering the latest and greatest meant this didn't matter much -- I didn't even notice. As an older person... it got annoying. That change in attitude was behind my switching to centering on English teaching and writing skills in the 2000's. Those are skills that retain their relevance for much longer periods.

 

--The End--

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