Meet our New President: Rod Stoddard
For 16 years, Silicon Beach Pioneer Media Temple has built a unique people-first company culture focused on supporting the creative and tech communities and fostering happy employees. We’ve shown our commitment to our people-first philosophy by financially supporting and helping organize industry conferences and community events, and, perhaps most importantly, by heavily investing in the “people behind the brand”, namely our employees. Because we believe that culture grows from within, input from every employee helps cultivate and strengthen our company culture.
In fact, culture is so highly valued at Media Temple that every future employee, regardless of their position or seniority, is interviewed against our core company values during the hiring process. This is how we ensure new hires are a good cultural fit and will contribute to sustaining the integrity of our core values. The same rigorous process was true when we sought out Rod Stoddard, Media Temple’s new President and our latest addition to the Media Temple leadership team.
Leveraging his 17-year expertise working in the IT, cloud computing and e-commerce industries, Rod oversees the company’s overall vision, strategy and execution, to ensure we continue our growth trajectory in the U.S. and internationally. Born and raised in Silicon Valley and a Los Angeles tech scene veteran, Rod most recently served as the President of Martindale-Hubbell, where he helped revive the 140-year old brand and build a best-in-class website solution for the legal community.
We asked Rod a few questions about himself and what’s next for Media Temple.
On his first exposure to technology:
Growing up in the Silicon Valley gave me an amazing exposure to the technology world. I was fortunate enough to attend schools that had computer labs with Apple computers. In middle school, I started coding and building fractals on an Apple Ile for my math class. Between my family and my friends, I was surrounded by early technology adopters – to such extent that Atari invited me, as a kid, to beta test some of their video games. How could I not get the technology bug after that?
On why he was attracted to Media Temple:
The Media Temple team is very, very talented. They are also genuinely passionate about the Media Temple brand, the company culture and the work that they do. I really find it quite exciting to have the opportunity to work with such a great group of individuals and such a respected tech brand.
For the last 16 years, Media Temple has consistently demonstrated its commitment to customers by delivering premium solutions. I am really excited about building on its success to accelerate its growth!
I also have to say that the fact that Media Temple is headquartered in Los Angeles was pretty attractive to me as I was travelling a lot to the East Coast at previous company, Martindale-Hubbell – which is definitely not ideal when you are trying to raise three young children. There has been a lot of exciting growth and development in the L.A. tech space and I look forward to continuing to be a part of that story.
On his familiarity with the L.A. tech scene:
I have lived in L.A. since 1993, and I spent the last 17 years working at tech companies in the IT, cloud computing, and e-commerce industries. I have also ingrained myself in the Silicon Beach culture by going to lot of local tech conferences and networking events – I guess you could say I know “the people in town”.
On what he’s bringing to Media Temple:
If you think about a company’s business life cycle, the question for me is: How can I help Media Temple move to its next growth stage? There are many ways to do this ranging from refining our processes to better understanding the needs of our customers. I am hoping to leverage my customer-focused approach to product development to make sure our current and future solutions fully meet our client’s needs. I hope to continue to build on Media Temple’s success and create new opportunities to support the web hosting needs of web developers, designers and creative agencies in the U.S. and internationally.
On what’s next for Media Temple:
Well, we’ve been very busy this first half of the year – from revamping our WordPress offering and enhancing our VPS hosting solutions to producing another amazing SXSW Interactive presence alongside local events like Media Temple’s second ping pong tournament in L.A. and Silicon Beach Fest, we’ve invested in solutions and experiences that delight our customers. Our latest milestone was the unveiling of our new managed cloud hosting services for AWS.
I can’t tell you exactly what’s on our roadmap for the second half of the year, but we are planning on being just as busy, so stay tuned!
