Nerdery leader Luke Bucklin makes 40 Minnesotans on the Move list
First-ever list by Finance and Commerce commemorates the business daily's 120-year anniversary in a special edition publication
Luke Bucklin, co-founder and president of web development firm Sierra Bravo Corp., was honored last night as he was named to the Finance and Commerce list of 40 Minnesotans on the Move.
The list of honorees was compiled, narrowed and selected by the writers and editors of the daily business publication, which also marked the occasion by celebrating the 120 year anniversary of Finance and Commerce as a newspaper dedicated to taking a daily snapshot of the Twin Cities business community.
In its special edition magazine supplement, the newspaper cites that Bucklin’s leadership of Sierra Bravo – home of Nerdery Interactive Labs (the Nerdery) – helped guide his company’s “ability to flip its business model” in transforming itself from its origins as legacy system integrators to a model that now “rents its nerds out to ad agencies and marketing firms to execute their creative solutions for clients.”
According Patty Henderson, senior director of strategy at magnet360, ad agencies are comfortable partnering with the Nerdery because their programmers’ knack for facilitating their creative process without interference – and with focus on developing their partners’ design pixel perfect. There is no “push/pull over who is driving strategy and who is directing creative on the project,” Henderson explains.
“Bucklin, 38, has proved this business model is more than just dollars and cents,” wrote the newspaper. “Sierra Bravo won a Microsoft-sponsored national design contest in March by participating with Minneapolis-based interactive agency Zeus Jones, beating teams from Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and New York.”
Held at the Bloomington Sofitel, the ceremony maintained a respectful tone as each inductee was announced – until, after Bucklin walked from the stage and applause smattered out, a voice (perhaps from Bucklin’s posse) cut through the silence with one definitive syllable: “Nerd.”
About the Nerdey
A division of Sierra Bravo Corporation, Nerdery Interactive Labs (the Nerdery) partners with ad, design and marketing agencies nationwide to execute their clients’ web projects, including social media and Web 2.0 applications. We developed Fallon’s vision for Skimmer, a lifestreaming app pooling users’ social media content, and won the PhizzPop Design Challenge at SXSW Interactive by developing agency partner Zeus Jones’s Usemore idea, an application for living green. We created the Overnight Website Challenge, a 24-hour community event pairing volunteer programmers with nonprofits to build better websites. Among America’s and Minnesota’s fastest growing private companies, Sierra Bravo made the Inc. 5000 and Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal’s Fast 50. Visit the Nerdery at http://www.nerdery.com.
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