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I went to one of aD's one-day seminars last year (where they gave the awards to the kids) and thought that it must have been a very cool place to work so I'm really disappointed to see things fall apart like this, but I thought that I'd tell a story which has some eery similarities to this one: the story of Kenan Systems. Kenan was also a small software company which was founded by an MIT teacher (Kenan Sahin) and a couple of his students. They started in the early '80's doing consulting work for enterprise customers; cool stuff, too, a lot of expert systems and multi-dimensional databases. The things that software engineers really wanted to work on before the web existed. Things went well and the company made money and grew. They expanded their consulting practice, opened offices in other cities, and after a brief (mostly unsuccessful) venture into packaged software they built a telephone billing system called Arbor/BP. It was a pretty aggressive bet at the time (late '80's) ...