so when i first moved here, to california, the silicon valley i was looking for a job in high tech. it was january 1999, the dot com boom was in full swing, but i didn’t have a degree. nonetheless, i found a job as a ‘staff engineer’ (read: grunt) at a company that a guy from church was forming. it was called petrasoft research, and the goal was to take on short term contract work. we did so until the end of 99, when a friend of the owner got vc money to fund his startup, and we closed up petrasoft and went to work for the new company – lightsocket.com. now this is where the crux of things happens. i got my first taste of real startup life. i put blood sweat and tears into lightsocket. build their office network from ground up until we got a real it guy. set up source repositories. physically wired all the offices. replaced the phone lines that we accidentally cut. moved furniture. set up furniture. got in early. stayed late. lightsocket’s big idea was to create an extensible platform for collaboration technology. this is similar to, but not the same as something like webex. so imagine this: it’s a special server that manages all the collaboration stuff that you need. starting sessions, joining other peoples sessions, tracking what tools/applications are being used in what sessions, etc. and a basic client that connected with the server and provided the user’s side of the collaboration stuff. then on each client, you could plug in whatever ‘sharable’ applications you wanted to use. you could write wrappers around just about any application and make it sharable, or write your own using the framework and api provided. also it’s cross platform, so you can run it on windows/mac/unix equally (yay java). this was all based on a project called ‘habanero’ at the university of illinois urbana/champagne, and as part of the startup, they hired 5 people from illinois to work with us to develop this new platform. so terry, mario, vil, jason and al all sign up and join the rest of us, stars in our eyes, convinced that we’re going to make it big. long story short, 10 months later we close up shop, no severance, no notice. come in on a monday and right into a meeting. “no money. sorry.” (sense a little bitterness there?) everyone scatters and tries to catch their breath, while dealing with the stinging blow of reality. the illinois contingent goes to work for cisco. the san jose contingent scrambles to find work, any work in the post-boom depression of silicon valley. some do. some don’t. the company closes.. or does it? last week an ex-employee sends me a little note, saying that lightsocket.com is back. after checking out the web site, i find that they have released two ‘plugins’ for the aol client – that allow you to surf the web together and collaborate on several applications. over aol. all i can think is ‘what a waste’. this could have been technology that changed the world, changed the way people worked and learned, but it’s been reduced to a co-browser plugin for aol. any vc’s looking for a good investment? i can get the illinois guys back together and we can make it happen for real. no ceo’s. no marketing/sales. no golden parachutes. no over-priced contracts and vp’s. no signing bonuses. if you want to start a company that produces nothing other than accounting irregularities, i’ll refer you to some ex-executives i know. if you want to invest in something that can actually be something, then e-mail me. one of the co-founders wrote an article for salon magazine about the death of lightsocket, you can read it here. i’ve moved on for now, but there’s rarely a week that goes by that i don’t still think about that time in my life, and often as not i rage about all the things that i think were done poorly. all the things that could have been done differently. the changes of direction that weren’t needed. the revolving executives. and i think about my dreams and hopes, and how much i wanted it to succeed. and it still could, as long as we don’t stop hoping.

—–