Chris Riche with Fox Optimization kicks off 2020 as our January Member Highlight!

Innevation Center member Christopher Riche is the Founder and CEO of Fox Optimization, a Reno startup developing innovative solutions to transform the staff scheduling experience for business customers with their flagship StaffFox SaaS application and proprietary SmartFillTM technology.

After years with Fortune 500 companies, Chris transitioned to become a serial entrepreneur. He helped found the Nevada Discovery Museum, led marketing for a startup which resulted in a $100 million-plus exit after just six years, and started a new company, for which he has raised over $1 million locally.

After graduating from University of Arizona with both a MS in MIS in Decision Support Systems and an MBA, Chris worked for Procter & Gamble and Intuit, both consumer-products powerhouses, in marketing and brand management. He moved to Reno in 2004 and founded the non-profit Nevada Discovery Museum, where he personally funded the project feasibility and funding studies, and along with great community support built the initial team, launched the capital campaign, and secured the downtown location. The Discovery Museum project ultimately raised well over $20 million and opened with over 50,000 visitors in the first three months.

Chris’ first commercial startup experience came in 2012 when he became the VP of Marketing for Gurobi Optimization. In that role, he led the marketing effort helping the company become a market leader in prescriptive analytics, which ultimately led to a successful acquisition by a private equity firm.

Chris founded Fox Optimization in 2018 with the vision of providing powerful and intuitive prescriptive analytics decision tools to help businesses better schedule their staff and optimize operations across their organization. This capability was previously only available to large enterprises with their own Operations Research departments and million-dollar budgets. However, with advances in computing and solvers, combined with proprietary algorithms, these capabilities can now be made available to many more businesses, at a much lower price point via a SaaS business model.

Like many entrepreneurs who have blazed the startup trail, 20/20 hindsight has helped Chris identify decisions that he would now make differently, as well as other decisions that worked out especially well.

On the opportunity side, while Fox Optimization had a very strong math team developing its proprietary technology, working with a limited budget pushed the company to look overseas for a web interface development firm. While Fox chose a well-recognized remote development firm, the project was too small to get the best people from the development firm. This was compounded by Fox not having a strong local web and mobile app technical leader who could closely manage the remote team. This was a mistake and led to significant technical debt and re-work once the issues became clear.

On the success side, two key factors have significantly helped the company. First, the core team, from the mathematicians to key customer success and sales roles, were chosen with great care and have been with the company from very early on. This stability and shared history helped the company make better decisions and weather challenges faced by a young startup.  Second, the investors in the company have brought both capital and expertise. From the very first investors who saw the need in their own business, to later investors who brought both capital and valuable technical, operational and financial perspectives to the company, the investors in Fox Optimization have been as valuable as the staff of Fox Optimization.

When we asked Chris about starting a company in Reno, Chris stressed the point that while Reno doesn’t yet have the maturity of a startup community like Austin or Silicon Valley, its rapidly growing entrepreneurial ecosystem, investor network and talent base all foreshadow the continuing growth and success of Northern Nevada.

Finally, when not working, Chris enjoys the amazing Northern Nevada outdoors, cycling pursuits, and spending time with his family.

You can learn more about Fox Optimization and their flagship product, StaffFox, at their website.