Welcome To Ziplyne!!
It’s a very special day for us at Ziplyne as we launch our blog: “Let’s Soar!” (more on why we chose that name in a future piece :) ).
Twice a month, we’ll aim to offer you fresh, fun content from a ranger of internal and external authors, but for our initial piece I wanted to write to you myself. My name is Rome Chopra, I am the CEO and co-founder of Ziplyne. Today, I want to tell you just a little about how exactly we got here.
In fact, it all started with my grandfather. Like many (most?) of our grandparents, he did not grow up using computers and the Internet was something beyond his dreams. But there he and I both were, sitting together in front of a computer at his retirement community as I attempted to teach him to use Gmail, Google and Facebook.
It was a labor of love but it was often frustrating for both of us. “If only I could clone myself,” I thought. “If only I could leave a piece of me behind to guide my grandfather through the process whenever he needed it.” But that was impossible…Or was it?!
When I graduated from Rutgers University, I had initially planned on a career on Wall Street but I decided to forgo that for a year and enroll in Masters program in Finance at Johns Hopkins University. I had a hunch and decided to follow it.
Within days of arriving in Baltimore, I applied to Johns Hopkins University’s Social Innovation Lab. My proposed project was for an interactive guide program to walk users like my grandfather through the finer points of various common Web programs and license the software to retirement communities across the globe. A few weeks later, I learned that we had been accepted into the 2014–2015 cohort.
On October 23, 2014 the new cohort was launched. In the midst of the exciting day, I remember briefly meeting a JHU Alum, who shook my hand and told me how much he enjoyed my presentation. That alum, Efrem Epstein, later became one of our initial employees and currently serves as our Chief Marketing Officer.
We’ve come a long way since then. We’ve expanded our vision to focus on enterprises and recently completed a rebrand to become Ziplyne (we look forward to sharing more about that experience in a future column).
Thank you for joining us on the Ziplyne….We’re looking forward to doing some great things together!
