Death Of A Content Management Start Up
"When your company takes VC money you should expect that the investors are going to want an above average return on their investment. This takes a bullish management style and often requires drastic measures that seem unfair and irresponsible"
This is a story about a company. A company that was profitable from Day 1.
A company that built products that were useful to many other companies. A company that had ethics, that treated the breadwinners (programmers) with respect, a company that could afford to help people and give away software and training, while still having enough left over to grow and save a few $million in the bank.
That is, until the venture capitalists arrived on the scene. Lying to customers and employees became commonplace. Greed replaced philanthropy as each of the company's unique programs was dropped. But, this is a company, and the goal is to make money -- any positive impact on the world is secondary, right? The real question is: how much money did they make?
The technical and managerial incompetence of the VCs and those they hired drove the company into the ground. All but 10 of the 240 employees were fired, laid off, or quit. All of the $40+ million in venture capital was squandered. The monthly operating profit turned to loss as more talentless executives were hired who threw out the company's old, useful products and put their blind faith in engineers who spent millions building complicated software that solved no business problems.
This is a story that will teach you something about building a software product, about profitably running a company, and about what can happen if unqualified organizations obtain control.
The Birth of ArsDigita
Since the early days of the Web, I had been building web sites for big-name clients in California with my friend Aurelius Prochazka. Meanwhile, Philip Greenspun and two of his friends, Jin Choi and Tracy Adams, were doing similar work out in Massachusetts. When I moved to Massachusetts in 1998, we joined forces and were quickly able to quickly attract high profile clients, such as Levi Strauss, Environmental Defense, and MIT Press.
Our band of programmers, called ArsDigita ("Digital Arts"), was profitable from the beginning. We had no office, no marketing staff, no letterhead. But we did have a few thousand dollars' worth of computer equipment and our five motivated selves.
The Birth of the ACS
It didn't take long for us to realize that we were solving some of the same problems over and over again for each of our sites. It doesn't matter if a site sells custom-made slacks, lets people share their photography knowledge with other enthusiasts, helps people fight environmental battles against companies polluting their groundwater, facilitates the trading of financial instruments, or helps people find the best combination of red, white, and sparkling wines for their next soirée.
Every site we built needed:
1. to talk to a relational database management system (RDBMS) to facilitate the collection of content from its users
2. a means for registering users and recognizing them upon their return to the site
3. a permission system to enable administration of the entire site, a section of the site, or an individual content item
4. a mechanism for grouping users so that they can be served content or given permissions appropriately
Instead of reproducing this for each client, we wrote a general data model, a few web pages, and some shared procedures, and called this collection of code the ArsDigita Community System (ACS).
We distributed the ACS free and open-source, not merely to be altruistic, but because it made sound business sense. If you are doing professional services, the best way to get your name out, have more clients find you (yes, free marketing), and improve the code base is to share it with the open-source world.
The ACS began as a small core of functionality, but more opportunities for code reuse quickly arose. Many of our clients wanted discussion forums. Quite a few needed ecommerce. Polls and portals and intranets and calendars and address books were repeatedly requested. It would have been foolish to build this functionality one-off for each client. It would have been a wasted opportunity to build this only for ourselves and not let our work reap the benefits of an open-source release. Hence we began the release of ACS modules that could run on top of the core. Dozens of useful modules were created, and that is what led to the adoption of the ACS by programmers and companies world-wide.
Growth
A small group of developers earning lots of money, making clients happy, and developing and releasing a useful software product is wonderful, but ... to make a substantial impact on the world, you gotta grow.
And grow we did. At first it was difficult to hire people because developers don't feel safe working for a company with no office or regularly-scheduled payroll. So, in the fall of 1998, we moved into an office. It didn't cost us much to rent a lovely old house in Harvard Square (complete with showers and kitchen, both which were well-appreciated after nights of obsessive coding). In January, we began a payroll system so that people's paychecks would no longer be tied to when our clients paid the invoices. Even if people were earning a bit less than before the structure was imposed, they were happy with the change. We were still earning a large profit each month. And now it was easy to hire people.
On January 1, 1999, ArsDigita had 5 employees. By January 1, 2000, we were up to 57, almost all of whom were developers. We had very little overhead and profits were rising. Around this time, we started looking in earnest for venture capital in order to accelerate growth and to allow ourselves the luxury of taking developers off of paying client projects so they could work full-time on our core product, the ArsDigita Community System (ACS).
By the end of March 2000, we had 110 employees (almost double what we had 3 months previously), 7 offices, healthy profits, plenty of cash in the bank, and $20 million in annual revenue, with the revenue figures still on an upward trend.
Company culture
The amazing thing is that greed and ruthlessness were clearly not necessary for us to rake in the cash. ArsDigita managed to make a large profit giving away free software and training. The revenue came from services and support.
During the growth, we never gave up on our fundamental priciples. These principles that we lived by made the company a fun place to work where the opportunities for learning were enormous. It's easy to sleep at night when you know you are doing good things for your clients and for the world. And when the good things you're doing are also contributing the bottom line, directly or indirectly, you know you've got a winning company.
Some of our principles:
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