Fast 15: Ben Hundley

Sometimes, the key to achievement is knowing when to quit.

Ben Hundley tried several career paths before he went on to design software that is making a splash on the national techie scene.

Well-known tech blogger Robert Scoble has written about Qbox.io, a cloud-hosted Elasticsearch for app developers, and the software has been featured on Rackspace.com and in The Wall Street Journal.

But Hundley did not set out to become a developer. He graduated from Jonesboro High School in 2007, with his eye on a career in graphic design, and attended Arkansas Tech University in Russellville to pursue it, until he realized it wasn’t for him and in 2008 moved to Sarasota, Florida, to study animation at Ringling College of Art and Design.

However, while his passion for art endured, he found the degree program would leave him with a limited scope of opportunity, career-wise.

And Hundley wanted to do his own thing, so he dropped out in 2009 and moved with a friend to Northwest Arkansas, where he got a graphic design job at Rockfish Interactive.

He started at the University of Arkansas in January 2010 — dropping out a couple of months later — and began learning Ruby programming language, which helped him land a software development job at Acumen Brands.

Although he never pursued a career in it, Hundley also loves cooking. He considers celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay a mentor — and not just in the kitchen — because of how he helps restaurant owners see the bigger picture in his show “Kitchen Nightmares.”

Many times, the owners are so entrenched in their work, and caught up in esoteric details they can’t see the forest through the trees, Hundley said. He sees a similar issue with programmers and strives to maintain perspective. 

At Acumen, he was introduced to the Northwest Arkansas startup scene, and when he quit the company in November 2011, he jumped in head-first, launching a project involving QR codes.

He then participated in The ARK Challenge in fall 2012, where he met the founders of Stacksearch Inc., who, a few months later, hired him as chief software architect.

From there, CEO Mark Brandon pitched an idea to him that ultimately became Qbox.io, and the company became its namesake in March.

As for the future, Hundley does not have specific plans. Technology is always changing, and “whatever is happening, that is where I want to be.”