Anthony Molzahn arrived in Fargo, North Dakota almost 10 years ago with aspirations of moving to California to pursue a career as a professional golfer. Anthony never left Fargo, and he is now providing solutions for transferring information in several industries as a co-founder of Project Phoenix. “We started our company to bring life back into despaired systems…. our goal is to see data reborn,” explained Anthony.

From Waiter to CEO

Anthony’s entrepreneurial journey has its roots in web development and design. As a 4th grader, Anthony spent time learning and gaining a passion for building websites. After a brief stint in computer science classes at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Anthony invested his time earning a degree in fine arts with a photography and computer design emphasis. During college, Anthony interned at a large printing press in Duluth, worked at Office Max as a printing employee, and also met and married his wife Jessica.

Jessica and Anthony moved to Fargo to be closer to family. After a couple of weeks in town, Anthony began working at Red Lobster as a waiter to save up money for their future plans of California.  It was about one month into serving tables that Anthony met Lanny Faleide, CEO of SatShot in Fargo and Langdon, North Dakota. Anthony shared that “Lanny mentioned a need for a web designer and asked me if I knew how to build websites… I responded, ‘Absolutely I do.'” After that conversation, Anthony went home that night and learned HTML web development by building a website for his father-in-law. The next day he interviewed with SatShot and became their web developer.

Over the course of 8 years with SatShot, Anthony gained knowledge and skills in web development as the front-end developer and web architect. Along this journey, Anthony also learned more about the precision agriculture industry. In early 2017, Anthony and his fellow co-founder, Avi Blackmore, separated from SatShot to pursue work on Project Phoenix. “We wanted to cut costs of our work with SatShot, build autonomy for our work, and create a universal API (application program interface) under as a new company,” explained Anthony.

Project Phoenix

Since the official start in May of 2017, the Project Phoenix team is focused on four ongoing projects. These projects include the reconciliation project with NASA (connecting data from space centers), a resource project with Lowes (following items in production), the Man Down Application (oil and gas industry), and Aegis Flow (an aerial/drone pilot for-hire application). Anthony presented about the future possibilities with Aegis Flow at the Drone Focus Conference hosted by Emerging Prairie in June 2017. Anthony describes Aegis Flow as “Istock and Uber meet drone and aerial pilots.” The function of Aegis Flow connects pilots to posted jobs from companies and individuals who will pay for images or videos of specific locations.

All of the work of Project Pheonix is built on a universal API that is in development. “Our API will function as a skeleton key for businesses for software development that will allow us to bring solutions to almost endless industries,” explained Anthony.

Learn more from Anthony Molzahn and Project Phoenix as he speaks at 1 Million Cups Fargo on Wednesday, June 21st, 2017 at 9:15 a.m. at The Stage at Island Park.