Bill Seitz

A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since April 20, 2001

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April 25, 2001, on ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up:
From Philip's writing above, it appears that the reason for accepting outside investment was to give AD greater credibility as an "enterprise software vendor". I don't have enough knowledge about the kind of work AD was seeking to be able to confirm that this was necessary. Philip compares AD to Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle in terms of needing to be perceived as "safe". But given that he was in a pretty different market (certainly from the latter 2), I'm not sure I agree with him. A big part of the issue is what different people's goals and expectations were. Would they have been met running a smallish yet profitable consulting company? Would those MIT guys have continued working 6 days a week without a financial windfall (which would probably only come from an IPO, which is where the enterprise/scale/VC thing starts...)? Did Philip want a more external proof of his "success"? Or a desire to see some liquid benefit of his ownership of a "profitable" company? (Note that with a small...