...CRAWFORD: We started in 2000 … as a jewelry procurement hub for the Corporate Premium Incentives Distribution Channel. … I had worked for a number of the larger jewelry manufacturers and as I traveled around the corporate arena and saw how these guys went about procuring products to use as rewards and incentives, it was archaic...So what we did is we developed a purchasing hub and gave the software to everybody, both on the manufacturing side and on the potential customer side, and that way we ingratiated ourselves into both entities by not charging them, and they became reliant on us. … And a process that took them months, we simplified it to where it would take them no more than 10 minutes...

...CRAWFORD: We wrote everything ourselves from the ground up. We procured nothing, we own all of our software and all of our hardware, and we have completely redundant systems in Colorado, so if anything happens here, we’re up and running there instantly...

...CRAWFORD: ...When Amazon wanted to launch jewelry, they came to us. So we go up into the Amazon system every 15 minutes, we pull the orders down, dissect them, drop them into 42 different factories, ship them out the door, and give all of the tracking stuff back to the Amazon customer, and all that Amazon does is take a nice, healthy chunk off the top. … We signed our first contract with them five years ago, and we just re-upped with them a year ago December. We’re about to download in the next month about 10,000 new SKUs into that Amazon storefront. And we do it for a lot of other people, invisibly, without anybody knowing it’s us doing it...

...PBN: How small did you start, and how did you scale it?

CRAWFORD: Just me. And I borrowed against everything I could borrow, I used up my entire 401(k). I went to the banks, but … in terms of trying to lend money against software and computers, you couldn’t get a single bank in Rhode Island to do it. Finally, the [R.I. Economic Development Corporation], which had a small-business development fund, did lend us money. … I paid that loan off very quickly, and the banks suddenly got interested. Sovereign Bank in particular has been absolutely wonderful. … [By] 2005 the VCs were knocking on our doors left and right, and we found a perfect match, Ascent [based in Boston]... 

...PBN: Is being in Rhode Island an advantage or disadvantage?

CRAWFORD: Certainly when we started it had a big advantage, because we started as an incubating company on South Main Street [in Providence] under the wings of a company called Fraunhofer… the talent they were relying on was coming from [the Rhode Island School of Design] and Brown, and we reached out to the colleges, and we have on staff, 12 months of the year, interns from URI, Bryant, Brown, Providence College...