Scott Kartsounes
Co-Founder
The story behind the software
Built by event operators who understood the cost of complexity.
Intelligence, Inc. was founded in 2002 by two former mobile DJs, Scott Kartsounes and Darren Hughes. After owning and operating one of Chicago's largest and most respected DJ entertainment companies throughout the 1990s, Scott and Darren founded Intelligence, Inc. on a simple premise: there had to be a better way.
At the time, running an event company meant information packets that cost thousands of dollars in printing and postage, contracts that took days to get signed, checks that were lost in the mail, and planning forms filled out with illegible handwriting. Request lists routinely included ten times more songs than could be played at a three-hour event. Booking calendars were nearly impossible to keep in sync across multiple staff members, and marketing dollars poured into magazines and bridal shows were difficult to track. The result was an overworked staff and an eroding bottom line.
With degrees in engineering and backgrounds in technology, Scott and Darren began building a system in 1998 to solve these problems. The rise of the internet in the late 1990s created the perfect platform for the first version of these tools, allowing clients to log into their company website to book and plan their events online. While the term Software-as-a-Service would not be coined until years later, the benefits were immediate. Clients embraced the online experience, and the business saw greater efficiency, improved organization, and lower operating costs.
As word spread, Scott and Darren were soon inundated with emails from other event companies asking if they could purchase the software for their own websites. After three years of growing interest, they decided to rebuild the system from the ground up into a fully customizable solution designed for any event professional. In early 2002, Intelligence, Inc.'s first commercial software platform was launched to rave reviews. Within eighteen months, it had grown to the point where the DJ entertainment company was sold so they could focus exclusively on software development.
Today, backed by a team of talented developers and industry experts, Intelligence, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies of its kind, and a recognized market leader in cloud-based software solutions for event professionals. Over the past two decades, the platform has been continuously built, improved, and refined through direct feedback from thousands of event companies that rely on it every day.
