In The Wake Of Personal Tragedy, Douglas Olsen Finds Inspiration In Building Kmunic8

In The Wake Of Personal Tragedy, Douglas Olsen Finds Inspiration In Building Kmunic8

In the wake of a personal tragedy, “life-hacks”, organization apps, and other tech-trinkets seem irrelevant. They did to Douglas Olsen, a CIO and entrepreneur.

When Douglas Olsen got the news his mom was sick, he focused all his energy on his family. Somewhere in-between hospital visits and reciting the same updates to different groups of people, his focus drifted back to tech. But, he wasn’t coding to escape his reality, he was coding to improve it.

Douglas spent all day with his mom in the hospital. His dad took the night shifts. At the end of each day, Douglas would begin the task of calling friends, texting family, and emailing others. He’d give each group a status update on his mom’s health. Relaying the same information over and over was physically and emotionally draining. As a lifelong technologist, and CIO of large footwear brand at the time, he assumed there had to be some tech company in some corner of the internet that could solve this messy communication problem with cleanly written code.

He was wrong.

 

Discovering The Window For Kmunic8

During a hospital visit, Douglas told his mom he was searching for a way to beat his quite literal game of telephone. She plainly stated “you should build it.” Those words set Douglas on a path of entrepreneurship.
 
The company he’s built since his mom’s passing, Kmunic8, honors her memory, fights to find a cure to the disease she battled, and solves the problem Douglas once faced.
 
“The experience has been incredible,” says Douglas. He released Kmunic8 to the app store just a few months ago, but is enthused by the feedback he’s received from users. Douglas’s app allows users to create a group of contacts and distribute the same message across different mediums, programmatically. Now you can send a text via Twilio SMS to Person A, make a call via Twilio Voice to Person B, and send an email to Person C, all in one fell swoop. Kmunic8 automates the cumbersome  process of relaying the same message over and over.
 
Now with the backing of the TwilioFund, Douglas has the financial and strategic support he needs to further expand his app. While the future of Kumnic8 is at the front of his mind, so is his reason for founding the company “For me it’s paying my mother back for taking care of me for a lifetime. It’s honoring her and thanking her for the job she’s done.”  Kmunic8 will donate 10% of profits to the Lymphoma & Leukemia Society.