It’s been 10 years from my first startup and now I’m ready to do it again. No matter what I’ll do, I have promised to myself that I’m going to rock the world!

It was precisely 10 years ago when I started my first startup, and yet the only one. No one called just established companies as startups at that time, though. Now after 10 years, I’m ready to do it again.

Back at the beginning of 2000’s, there were three of us who had an idea of software which already existed in the market, but customers were complaining that it was too complex, too hard to use, and it also cost too much money. We were certain that we could build something better with less money and what was the most important, with more in mind what customers really wanted. Back then, we mastered Delphi, PHP, Bourne Shell, Visual Basic and C++. The first iteration was to build a classic client-server software using Delphi. The next iteration is something I remember very well. I was well experienced with PC’s, IT management and IT organizations, and I felt that building something that had to be installed on computers wouldn’t be very wise anymore. I wanted to have software which would run on a browser. And I meant every browser. No matter if you were using a PC or a mobile phone. Well, it was year 2002 and there weren’t so many mobile phones that could be used for internet browsing, but I was lucky enough to own the business phone of the time. The Nokia Communicator. I didn’t think Communicators or other internet browsing capable mobile phones would get very common in the future, but I had experienced how clever it was to be able to get things done whenever you needed. I struggled with my partners about the architecture but finally I won. We started to develop our software using PHP.

Back then we had a friend. The first time I met this guy, he was introducing me his own operating system he was writing using assembler. No, he wasn’t Linus Torvalds. This guy was more of a genius than Mr. Torvalds :). Anyway, we hired this guy to develop our software and one task we gave him was to make the software to run in browser and to feel and acts like standard Windows software. While this guy made what we said him, he was still able to surprise us. With his talents, we were able to have features like drag’n’drop. Yep, in a browser and yep, 10 years ago.

The software we developed became the market leader and was sold forward. Developing browser-based software was definitely one reason for the success, but the second and maybe a bigger reason was that the software was delivered as a service. This happened in 2004. Our clients were able to get the benefits of the service right after client meetings because it was already running in a datacenter. We just enrolled an account for a new customer and they were ready to rock’n’roll. Nowadays this is called Software as a Service.

I had to step down from the company and I sold my stocks in 2004 because I was getting too busy with my real job. That’s because our startup was a hobby to me, which started to take too much time. But this example of freedom to make decisions and to be able to really love your products and services has started to burn inside me so badly that I had to do something to it. At the time of writing, it’s my last week in my current job and within a few days, I’ll be free to start my next startup. This time it will be more serious and not a hobby. This also means that I won’t be having exact payrolls every month, but I have figured that it’ll be worth it because I have promised myself that I’ll be doing something that will change the world. Ain’t that what startups are for? 🙂