A Dotcom in a Basement?

garyebickford asks: "I recently learned that a company I co-founded a long time ago has degenerated to the point where the present principals have sold off most of the equipment and have moved 'operations' into their houses. Though the founding concept is almost two decades old, they still believe that they'll be able to pull something out of a hat. I'm pretty sure the two remaining true believers haven't been paid for several years, and have been working outside to support themselves. The company hasn't sold anything for years as far as I know, but they have kept it running through an amazing series of trials and tribulations including some of the most amazing legal shenanigans I've ever heard of. The stock was delisted a long time ago and is now valued at about $0.001. Of course, who knows? Maybe it will recover. It's happened before. I'm sure we all know of many others, like snakebit projects that have migrated from company to company, and 'entrepreneurs' who could raise money over and over but never quite get a company going, and of course, really cool technology that just never seemed to come out of development, or was almost done when the money ran out?So Slashdot, fess up - do you have a 'company in a box' downstairs? What kind of earth-shaking, irrelevant or worthless technology is sitting under your stairs? More interestingly, why are you, or they, still committed to the business?"

Comments

Oh! I got one!

[dJCL]

Ok, I run a site, have plans for it that could make me some money in the future, but the site was started after the bust and my main reasons for creating it were to learn something new and to replace a site that had decided to charge subscription fees for basic usage... rather annoyingly too...

It costs me $30/month to run it, I think I can deal with that... One of these days I'll call it reasonably complete and actually go looking for customers too... Ah well... I got other sites to write...

I knew a guy...

[Elwood P Dowd]

I knew a dude (his daughter was in my high school) who had a little start up with some kind of database software. I have no idea what the innovation was, but they were convinced that they would take the enterprise DB world by storm. (This is where I should note that I can't recall the name of the company.) He had several coders on staff, but when Oracle finished stringing him along and his tech didn't sell to any of the big players, he fired everyone and kept it on the back burner, working on it himself.

Eventually, Oracle bought him & his code (According to his daughter's non-technical understanding, they *needed* his code.) and he signed on as an Oracle VP. Another girl at my highschool had a dad who was a VP at Oracle, and I remembered him & many other VPs getting axed, so I knew that there was some serious churn in the upper ranks. Thus, I was unshocked when Oracle stiffed him for his code (dunno if they got away with it or he sued) and fired him.

Last I heard was before the bubble burst, and he was doing coding for some dot com, and enjoying it.

All this is filtered through several different types of bias (My own included. Had a crush on his daughter.) but I think it's close to the truth. He had some really lean years after he shrank his company, because despite saving up, he went a lot longer without selling his code than he ever expected.

ISP in a basement

[humblecoder]

My wife and I purchased a townhouse from the founder of a local ISP. When he first started the ISP, he started it literally out of the basement of the townhouse. At one time, he had no less than FIFTY phone lines coming into the house to support the ISP. In the basement of the townhouse, there was an enormous switchbox to support all those lines. I believe the guy had his own T-1 line to handle the bandwidth, but I couldn't say for sure.

The real estate agent used this as a selling point, saying that if we ever had the need for 50 phone lines, the townhouse could handle it! We ended up buying the townhouse, but mainly because of the cathedral ceilings. The extra phone hardware was a nice little bonus.

We have since sold the townhouse, so if you are a dot-com wannabee, don't ask me ask me if it's for sale!

I have one (serious post)

[jtheory]

Well, "serious post" as much as any endeavor of this type can be considered serious...

I've worked completely solo to build this website -- basically, it offers online interactive music exercises with a lot of support for teachers.

I brought it online just a week ago... now I'm waiting to work out a few more kinks before I open the doors to floods of subscribers.

Well, I think I'm guaranteed 2 or 3 subscribers... we'll have to see about the "floods". Anyway, I'm hosting it for $30/month, which I mostly paid for by reselling a bit of my bandwidth to an uncle for his website (he sells batteries and UPS systems).

So... thus far the only real cost are my time (and I built it all outside of my normal working hours).

In some ways, this nicest payoff from this sort of project is the emails from appreciative users... but yeah, I'm hoping it'll become a minor revenue stream. Ego boosts only go so far, in the end (as the work gets less fun).

eXtr@ct

[garyebickford]

They're here.

I've periodically lobbied them to open source their software (which is very cool, actually) and develop a business model like MySQL AB. So far no interest.

In the late 1980's the company was on the American Stock Exchange and valued at over $200 million (this was before the dotcom bubble and after I left.)

They acquired the name eXtr@ct fairly recently, when they came out of bankruptcy. Before that they were named AUDRE, Inc. (short for AUtomated Digitizing and REcognition - we wanted something personal, instead of compudatagraphitronics.) IMHO, if a name/logo is an indicator of a business or a predictor of success then eXtr@ct is disaster. Ever wonder about Enron's teetering E? Hmm.