Joe Shipman

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• April 25, 2001, on ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up:

  My summary -- "service companies" can make you rich, but "product companies" can make you obscenely rich, and they thought that their productization of aD would make them obscenely rich because they didn't understand the huge obstacles to such a conversion, being clueless about both the software services business and the software product business. Actually, the old aD had a product, but it was an open-source product, so they made money on the associated services. To go to closed-source, and expect to make money from directly selling a product that hadn't been developed yet, in the face of entrenched competition, was quite remarkably unwise even by the standards of the dot-com industry. One lesson I have learned from this is that the most valuable product anyone could possibly invent would be a foolproof evil-detector for evaluating prospective business partners. (Stupidity-detectors already exist, and Philip made the mistake of not using them seriously enough, but the reason ...

• April 27, 2001, on ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up:

  Michael Turyn: You get my nomination for the most thoughtful and best-written comment. I especially liked "timid reversion-to-the-mean (in all senses) corporate behaviour once a company has gone public". Toby Cabot: Thanks for the Kenan story. My company competed with Kenan and we were wondering what happened to them.... My company had Philip on its technical advice board, but the founders eventually stopped listening to advice and to customers in order to build an empire before the revenues were there to support it. Just like at arsDigita, the VCs came in and kicked them out; though unlike at aD, in this case the VC's action was both good business (the company has gone from being very unprofitable to being profitable) and legally unproblematic (the VC's were majority stockholders with 60+ percent). Velmurugan Chandrasekaran: You are right to warn "beware of VC's" but it sounds funny coming from someone with your initials.