Name: Jecca Cervero

Section: O0C

Case study Chapter 22

Ann Winblad

Cofounder, Open Systems, Hummer Winblad

            Winblad always had to figure out ways to make a living even as a young girl. When she started college, she was one of the top students with top grades as “experimental” students. So, it allowed her to take a lot more focused courseware than most students. She had a business major and a math major.

            In the early 70’s she was hired at the Federal Reserve Bank. Then she started out as a consulting company and she would do the “real” startup project at night. Year 1975, the year that Microsoft started and Microsoft was writing Basic for Kit computers. Even though she wasn’t any different in age than these people of the last year of computing, she got some real computer science knowledge. The coming of the microprocessor and the first affordable PC’s created a new opportunity for programmers. Winblad was one of the first generation of entrepreneurs who figured out by trial and error what a software startup was. After six years, she and her cofounders sold the company for over $15 million. In 1976, Ann Winblad started Open systems, an accounting software company with the help of $500 she borrowed from her brother.

            In 1989, she co founded Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, the first venture firm to focus exclusively o software, in the years, since, 45 of its portfolio companies have been acquired or gone public. Now, Winblad is probably the most powerful woman in venture capital.

            Her advice to founders starting companies is “Think like a big dog, and find leverage to get there.”

Name: Jecca Cervero

Section: O0C

Case study Chapter 23

David Heinemeier Hanson

Partner, 37signals

Heinemeier Hanson is a part of the 37signals 2.0 management team founded by Jason Fried as a web design shop in 1999. It transitions from a consulting company to a product company with the creation of Basecamp in early 2004. He was working with 37signals as a contractor. He did the programming.

            The idea came to them that blogging had been a pretty good way of distributing information between people. This is going to help them solve their consultancy needs. Basecamp was basically, trying to be one step above email.

            Hanson wrote the company’s first product, Basecamp, an online project management tool. He also wrote companion products Backpack, To-do List, and Campfire. He was the only programmer and systems administrator on Basecamp. That’s how he found Ruby to allow him to be build Basecamp and drive this project in the way that he wanted to do.

            In July 2004, he  released the layer of software that underlies these applications as an open source web development framework. Ruby on Rails has since become one of the most popular tools among web developers and won Heinemeier Hanson the Hacker of the Year award at Oscon in 2005.

            In July 2006, 37 signals president Jason Fried announced on the company’s blog that Jeff Bezos had made a minority private equity investment.

Name: Jecca Cervero

Section: O0C

Case study Chapter 24

Philip Greenspun

Cofounder, ArsDigita

Philip Greenspun is the cofounder of ArsDigita, He founded ArsDigitta in 1997. ArsDigita is a new model for software consulting and an all-tool-colorful example of dangers of vnture capital.

            Philip Greenspun started building Internet applications in the early 1980s. He liked multi user applications and for him connecting people over the network if they were separated in space and time was just going to be the best usage of computer systems. But, because theree was no operating system and no real standard programming environment, whatevr you built would only work on one kind of computer system. So, if you built it for Macintosh, it wouldn’t work for Windows, or vice versa.

            Then in the early 90’s web came along. Greenspun decided to build something that is specified on the server side, and the user experience will be rendered by the browser. Something that has a simpler user interface, but guaranteed to work on any kind of computer.      

            Greenspun started giving away his software. He just tried to document it and make it as general as possible and easy to install and stuck it on his website as a free open source thing. There was a kid he worked with and for thet boy ArsDigita is a good name. then big companies started calling to Greenspun. They liked his system but it needs ten extra features so, they want him to make the changes. After few calls, some of his friends decided that they would band together and establish a little company to do support and service.

             I think what people want about ArsDigita is its good design and it was much faster than other software. ArsDigita grew out of the software that Greenspun wrote for managing photo.net, a popular photography site. He released the software under an open source license and was deluged by requests from big companies for customer features.

Three Things I have Learned

• Not to worry so much about the competition, concentrate on getting really good people who shared the company’s vision, who could be mentioned to the point where they could then recruit somebody else.
• Philip Greenspun founded ArsDigita in 1997
• ArsDigita is a company that produced a popular toolkit for building database-backed community websites, and flourished at the peak of the Internet bubble. It was known for actively supporting an open-source version of its toolkit, although the community supporting that version split away from the company in 1999.