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It's my birthday! Figured it was as good as any day to start posting here again. I just ran across this cool site for doing JavaScript encryption.
This is one of the coolest marketing things I've ever seen. This launched last year at the Detroit Auto Show, and has taken several thousand pictures of people. 40 cameras ring the subject, and then special software renders out to an animated GIF. I've included the larger raw GIF here. Good stuff!
It's been a little over a year now that I've been gone from Splunk. In the days shortly after our 'opportunity', Raffy Marty and I began talking about our unemployment situation and what we were going to do about it. It was during one of these discussions the topic turned to the future.
"I've decided to do a data visualization startup!", Raffy announced. He had recently written a book on visualizing data, so that made sense to me. "You'll need somewhere to store the data.", I opined. "We should do a cloud based log management service so people could build something like it without having to screw around with the logs." Interesting he said, but he'd have to think on it a bit.
Fast forward through the next year. We spent some time in the Summer talking with a few friends and companies about our idea. I did a brief stent at Mashery as their ops guy, then pulled the trigger and quit to do Loggly fulltime.
Raffy and I officially joined forces in August, incorporated Loggly in September, brought Jon Gifford in as our technical co-founder in October, fund raised in November, and closed an A round with True Ventures in December. January, February, and March found us coding, and in April we launched the product for use by a limited number of private beta customers. Since the beta signup launch in late January we've gotten over 300 beta signups, even some of notoriety, and have added over 500 followers on Twitter . We did all with zero marketing, other than the piece that ran on VentureBeat.
Today we over four partnerships partnerships stewing in the pressure cooker, which could result in several thousand companies in the channel, and on top of that there are a few significant events (both personal and business related) gated to occur in the next week that make what's happened so far look like a piker eating cold oatmeal in comparison. The only way we can screw this up is to fly it into the ground.
I was relating all this to an acquaintance over drinks a few days ago. "There's no fucking way you should tell this story to an entrepreneur who is doing a startup!", he said. "You'll either set the wrong expectations if they're early, or depress the hell out of them if they've been at it for a while." He's got a point, as by all accounts what has happened to me in the last year is definitely NOT normal, but it's certainly not unexpected when taken in context. I've been risking for a good while now.
After doing Zoto, I found myself running low on cash reserves. While I did OK on the Grub deal with LookSmart, I ran not-so-lean for a few years afterwards and ran long on pulling the plug on Zoto. When Brenda, the kids and I moved to California in late 2007, to look for a startup opportunity, we had maybe a half a year's worth of cash reserves left.
Unfortunately, that cash slowly dwindled as our house in Oklahoma City sat on the market until well into the middle of 2008. The temporary job I had taken at Splunk became less important as a crash course on learning about the enterprise software business, and more important to an ongoing contribution to our pocketbook. By the time we sold our house in June of 2008, we barely had enough left to put a down payment on a small house out here in San Francisco. It put us in quite a pickle. Should we buy a house, or start a business?
That question didn't linger in our minds long. Getting canned from my job last year caused a financial panic. Having no choice on the matter, we started tightening the buckle by moving to a cheaper rental, and selling some land that my Grandfather had bought back in the 30s, which was now worth a fair amount. By the time the end of Summer 2009 rolled around, we had managed to get our monthly burn down below what we were spending in Oklahoma well before we sold Grub in 2003, and had enough cash left to do a 4-5 month run on a startup. We decided to pull the trigger.
"Is this log thing a good idea for a startup?", my wife asked. "Yes, and it's the perfect time to do it.", I said. The idea behind Loggly is sound. It's a log file management service for cloud computing based software startups. The theory is everyone who hosts servers in the public cloud has logs, and they are an absolute nightmare to deal with. Those logs contain business critical data important to revenue and health of the company, and are used for everything from security to web analytics. "Companies moving to the cloud need this service", I said, "and I know how to execute on it."
Doing a startup is a huge risk. It risks you financially, physically, mentally, and socially. Our results with Loggly are FAR from typical, but my story is not. As entrepreneurs, each and everyone one of us are required to risk something in order to succeed. We ask our wives, children, parents, friends, investors, even the employees we hire and the partners we partner with, to risk right along with us.
While the last few month's events have turned into a huge opportunity for me, and can either be overly inspirational for some and depressing for others, it all started with what seemed to be the cumulation of the worst few years of my life. It was out of that singular event, being canned, that the desire to posses a solid idea and the determination to risk for gain came and consumed me.
Without lessons there is no learning, without living there is no life, and with out risk there is no reward.