Beautiful storytelling by Josh @ First Round Capital about the invention of the modern mailbox (and their new investment, gnip). I really like the pacing & tone & content of the story, and it couldn’t make clearer what gnip aspires to do. (I have an interest in what they’re doing, of course, but hadn’t taken the time to read through all of it — with Josh’s story in my head, though, it’s both immediately interesting & compelling — perfect use of a story.)
startups
27
May 08
Hybrids & NetSquared
I’ve been meaning to write about a John Markoff NYT piece from a few weeks back — it’s on the intersection of technology innovation & social mission. The featured company in the article is TechSoup (formerly Compumentor), and Mozilla features in the article as well.
I was really happy to see Markoff write this piece — it’s clear from here that there’s a new type of organization emerging in the world that we term “hybrid” — mission-driven companies like Mozilla and TechSoup, but who compete in the market with products and services. It seems to me that this is happening because the barriers to collaboration are falling precipitously — it’s easier and cheaper than ever to get together with a group of like-minded folks to work on changing the world. So people seem to be doing it, which is wonderful.
TechSoup is hosting the 3rd annual NetSquared Conference today (and blogging it here). The conference is outstanding, and was incredibly helpful to the PCF/Miro team last year, resulting in some long-lasting relationships.
NetSquared is a great gettogether of lots of organizations like this, and hopefully a preview of things to come, with more social mission organizations in the world. The TechSoup folks deserve a lot of praise for this sort of foresight and investment.
8
May 08
firedrop! zaplet!
In a weird blast-from-the-past moment, TechCrunch reported yesterday that hot mail startup Xobni has licensed the IP from Zaplet (nee Firedrop, and most recently bought by MetricStream), a company we started from Reactivity nearly 10 years ago. TC has bits and pieces of the story, and gets most of the basics of the history right. Seems like both yesterday and an eternity ago when Mike Hanson and Brian Roddy and I were brainstorming about live HTML in e-mail and when Mike mocked up the first one — as we were searching for names, we started with Zimlet or Zaplet or Zammogram, among many other very bad names. Then Brian Axe took it and started to build a business case, recruited Dave Roberts, got some mad Firedrop namage & logo help from Gentry, and was away to the races. (And IIRC, the Reactivity Austin team of Lynn and Dave and others built the screenshots showing up on TC now.)
Anyway, it’s neat to see that another piece of Reactivity technology is still breathing — and hopefully will be put to good use at Xobni.
3
Mar 08
AllPeers
It’s been a busy day, so I’m a little late to get to this, but I’m sad to note that AllPeers is shutting down. I’m bummed, of course, not just because a Mozilla-related startup is calling it quits, but also because it’s become easy in such a prolific startup era to be jaded about startups and not to notice when they pass. I really applaud what Matt and Cedric and the team have done, and am glad that they took a run at P2P in the browser. I have no doubt that they’ll all land happily and do great with their next thing — but I also have no doubt that it’s a trying time for them. So it’s with great respect for them all that I say congratulations for making the contribution they have (to Mozilla and the whole ecosystem) and that I’m looking forward to what’s next.
2
Jan 08
10 years ago today
It was 10 years ago today that Brian Roddy and I drove to Sacramento to incorporate Reactivity (Bryan Rollins, our 3rd founder, wasn’t here yet). Seems like a lifetime ago — I wondered when we did that whether we’d make it 10 years, since the vast majority of new enterprises fail much sooner. We didn’t make it all 10, but we made it more than 9, with Brian and Mike and Peter and others selling the company to Cisco a little under a year ago now.
I spent a lot of time thinking about those 10 years on my run today — it was such an important period in my life I don’t know that I’ve really been able to process it. What I do know is that starting Reactivity and working on it with Brian, Bryan, Mike and many, many others over the years is something that I’m very proud of, and I know that it’s shaped much of how I think about the world in general, and the tech biz specifically.
Anyway, nothing profound — just thought I’d note the anniversary.
Books & eBooks
Jul 29, 6:54 › Borja: the ebooks have another, IMO, critical flaw which Jul 28, 18:07 › John: Yes, exactly. We have whole rooms that are pretty Jul 28, 18:06 › John: Alfred -- could you send me a screen shot? also try Jul 28, 14:11 › phik: I love my ebook reader, and like you, I almost refuse