It sure doesn’t seem like it’s been 10 years. Sometimes I look around at our team, our clients, and I just can’t believe that we’ve come this far.

I still remember hooking up a server rack in Jack’s kitchen, blowing most of the fuses in his house. I guess you can say that we did it the old fashion way – no venture capitalists, nothing fancy. We’ve just always believed that if we’re the best at what we do, we take care of customers, and we help them be successful, the money will take care of itself. Ten years in and it’s worked out pretty well.

We won some business very early on with two dot-coms, an electronic bill-pay company and another group called “Rooster.com” that was going to revolutionize the e-world of agriculture. These two kept us pretty busy for the first year. But, like so many other ill-fated, VC-backed boondoggles of the time, they both went belly-up early in 2001.

Mostly we starved for the next nine months, until we finally got a break from an old colleague that Jack and I worked with earlier in our careers. We sent out our first invoice in Nov, 2001 for this bit of charity work. It was for $700. It wasn’t much, but somehow we knew that. Okay, at least we could finally stay in separate hotel rooms for once!

After Jack’s kitchen, our first “real” office was a small apartment in the old Lance cracker factory. This space was a converted loft that was zoned as “live-work.” It was always a bit odd escorting clients down the hallway past peoples’ welcome mats and folks bringing in their groceries. All things considered, it was cool and most importantly, cost effective. We had a great time there, and clients seemed to enjoy coming to visit us for meetings. We had a pancake place and a sushi joint in our building. What more could we hope for? Read More »