Name: Jecca Cervero

Section: O0C

Case study Chapter 30

Mena Trott

Cofounder, Six Apart

Mena Trott together with her husband Ben Trott started Six Apart in their appartment. Six Apart has enabled millions of individuals, media companies and enterprises to create blogs and form rich, interactive communities. it now does power conversations among passionate people and leading organizations around the world, and provides services and media solutions to help bloggers to be more successful. Six Apart was named for the number of days between their birthdays.

Mena started with a blog called Dollarshort in about April 2001. She did it because she felt that she needed a creative outlet. She is just starting creating blog, writing stories. She was still at her job, but she didn’t feel incredibly fulfilled. Her blog was getting more popular, and they were getting more involved in seeing people were doing.

            When the company closed and they got off, they started working on a blogging tool. They didn’t expect anything from it. They thought they would get donations and maybe some stuff of their Amazon Wish List, but they never imagined anything more than that.

            As they got more involved, they became more ambitious, but they never thought that will come to the point where they would want to start a company. It just never occurred to their mind that it was even possible.

            Time came that Mena and Ben decided to develop their own and share it with some friends. Movable Type became popular almost immediately on its launch in October 2001, but they build new software for TypePad instead of reusing the code you had for Movable Type because they realized that more and more people were coming to blogging with less and less experience. That’s relative to the people who are coming now, who are probably have only installed one web application.

            In 2002, the number of folks embracing blogging was growing and they knew that in order to be able to serve this new audience, they need to create a product that didn't require a web server or technical expertise. While Movable Type was intended for the designer, engineer or tinkerer, their new product, TypePad was intended for those who just wanted to blog. While they were working on TypePad, they were contacted by Joi Ito, an entrepreneur and investor in Tokyo who was also an avid Movable Type user and supporter. In April 2003, Six Apart received funding from Joi Ito’s Neoteny. They launched their hosted service, Typepad, later that fall.

In Janury 2005, the company announced the acquisition of Danga Interactive, the makers of LiveJournal. Six Apart launched Vox , a hosted blogging platform with a  social networking component, in 2006.

Three Things I Learned

·        You can almost always take a negative situation and turn it to your advantage if you work hard at it.

·        Mena and Be Trott founded Six Apart in 2001 , during a period of unemployment.

·        Read what your customers have to say. The most obvious piece of advice, but the most important. Customers who are invested in a service usually want the company that's supporting them to succeed. The best advice comes from your customers, and they aren't afraid to tell it like it is. That said..

Name: Jecca Cervero

Section: O0C

Case study Chapter 31

Bob Davis

Founder, Lycos

Bob Davis founded Lycos in 1995.  Lycos’s original technology came out of CMU. The technology was invented back in 1994 by a brilliant computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University named Michael Mauldin, whose nickname was Fuzzy. It was a research project, the result of federal research grant. So it was fuzzy by himself in a closeted office at the research lab at CMU.

            He knew he had something, but wasn’t really sure what to do with it and didn’t want to be a business person in a commercial entity. So he worked with CMU’s Tech transfer Office to try to sell the technology. They came across Dan Nova of CMGI, which at the time was a small, early-stage, $35 million venture capital fund, and grew into one of the most successful internet investment firms of its era. And Davis get involved in the founding when Dan Nova called him just to check in socially. He told Davis about how he was trying to put a deal together with Carnegie Mellon for a technology and that, if he got it done, he wouldn’t have a CEO. At that point he was in the early stages of thinking about the deal. Davis volunteered himself to be the CEO.

            So they taked more about it and Davis worked with him as he went through the process of wrapping up the deal with Carnegie Mellon. He then joined as the CEO of a company that didn’t exist yet because Carnegi Mellon still had the technology and hadn’t closed the deal with CMGI. So for about a week in June 1995, he was the CEO of Lycos, but Lycos didn’t exist. They had no other employees, no customers, no products.

            For the first month, they stated building the team. They are trying to understand what they were doing for a livig and how they were going to go about doing it. They decided to make something that they were licensing their technology at the same time they were building their own branded site, selling advertising.

            The company grew rapidly over the next several years as Internet usage exploded.

            By the peak of Internet Bubble, it was the fourth most popular site on the Web. In 2000, Lycos was acquired for $5.4 billion by Terra Networks, a subsidiary of the Spanish telephone company, Telefonia.

            Davis is currently a managing general partner at venture capital firm Highland Capital.

Three Things  learned

• Lycos, like Yahoo is a source for all the Web has to offer -- search, free online games, free e-mail, free blogs & websites, videos & movies, news, and more.
• Bob Davis the CEO or founder of Lycos
• Think more about the consumer and less with the technology