Why we are where we are: The main thing that bugs me about this
server fund thing and the talk that's coming out of it (especially the
quote in this
article from me!) is that we sound like dorks who never had a business
plan or any thoughts that we needed to make money (and, consequently, our
investors sounds like idiots as well). We may be dorks because we failed to
execute on the revenue-generating facets of our plan quickly enough.
But we've never been unaware of the need to make money or one of those many
dot-coms who planned to live off investor money until they got bought out.
When we started the company, we were developing a web application for
workgroups within companies. We were doing "enterprise" software (before it was cool!) that we
planned all along to charge for as soon as we brought it out of beta. We
started Blogger as a side to introduce people to us but never spent any time
on it because we didn't think we could afford to. We finally only decided we
could focus on it earlier this year after we identified potential revenue
sources from Blogger that would allow us to sustain it. What we failed to do
is get our ducks in a row and start bringing in money from those revenue
sources quickly enough -- partly because we assumed we could raise another
round of money this fall/winter. I'm not saying we didn't screw up. Just
that we didn't screw up in the way that people seem to assume.
server fund thing and the talk that's coming out of it (especially the
quote in this
article from me!) is that we sound like dorks who never had a business
plan or any thoughts that we needed to make money (and, consequently, our
investors sounds like idiots as well). We may be dorks because we failed to
execute on the revenue-generating facets of our plan quickly enough.
But we've never been unaware of the need to make money or one of those many
dot-coms who planned to live off investor money until they got bought out.
When we started the company, we were developing a web application for
workgroups within companies. We were doing "enterprise" software (before it was cool!) that we
planned all along to charge for as soon as we brought it out of beta. We
started Blogger as a side to introduce people to us but never spent any time
on it because we didn't think we could afford to. We finally only decided we
could focus on it earlier this year after we identified potential revenue
sources from Blogger that would allow us to sustain it. What we failed to do
is get our ducks in a row and start bringing in money from those revenue
sources quickly enough -- partly because we assumed we could raise another
round of money this fall/winter. I'm not saying we didn't screw up. Just
that we didn't screw up in the way that people seem to assume.