Jim's Blog

Back in 2000, a few of us started a company and accepted VC money to build a product.  The VCs pushed us to hire anyone who could breath so we could build a product as quickly as possible, make a couple of sales, and go public with the company so they could profit.  Unfortunately it doesn't work that way.

When all the VC money ran out, I think we had spent around $24 million dollars to build a product for which, suddenly, no telecom company could afford to buy a license.  We couldn't get a second round of funding out of any VC firm because the Internet Bubble, pumped up with the air from worthless dot coms, had popped.

I'm involved in a project now that is based on open source.  Some call it open sores.  What's ironic is that the open source software provides for free a significant portion of the product we wanted to sell back in 2001.  It's called Eclipse.

Eclipse is not just a Java IDE, it's an environment that pulls together OMG standards, such as UML, MOF, and XMI; gives you a crank to turn that spits out Java code with semantics that match the UML model; and gives you a basic editor that allows you to populate your generated code with instances.  Our product did more than that, but if the latest Eclipse version had been around back in 2000, we probably would have been able to make a few sales and take our company public before the Internet Bubble burst.

Bummer. We were in the right place at the wrong time.

Permalink | Posted by Jim @ 12:12 PM