Breaking the silence – Provo Labs

First of all, I’ve been called out by several people for not blogging. Most recently by my friend Russell Page – sorry Russ, I’ll explain it all here. I haven’t blogged for almost a month and there are a couple of very big reasons why – and they all stem from the largest reason. My regular readers know that I’ve been working for Paul Allen’s company, Provo Labs, as Paul’s COO/CTO. Well, about a month ago Paul called me into the conference room and told me that he was going to shift the company from an incubator building new businesses to a holding/growth company that would focus only on growing the companies we had started. As part of this Provo Labs would have no employees and that any employees that were not working in one of the startup companies was going to be let go. This included myself and about 10 other employees, mostly programmers.

Paul and I then negotiated several things that basically came down to this: I would give up my options in Provo Labs’ companies in exchange for the technologies that we had been working on building. At the time, I had leads on at least 3 really good jobs that I could have taken. Instead, I decided that the best move for me would be to hire the entire operations and development teams from Provo Labs and start a new company doing contracting work, specifically website development and marketing – all with zero funding and very little money to build it with.

So, since the end of July we have been working feverishly to build our company and survive. Honestly, things have been pretty rough – but the Entrepreneurial Spirit has truly kicked in over here. Here are some evidences of that:

– We’re working out of my basement (isn’t that the first requirement of a true startup? )
– Since August 5th we have been out of money and have had no guarantee of any money coming in – and every employee still shows up for work everyday knowing that there is no promise of a paycheck.
– We tenaciously go after new work – No job too big or small!
– Tomorrow will mark the second time this week that we have planned an all-nighter to hammer out some code to get a project finished (again, with no guarantee of being paid)
– More than half of our employees have come to me and told me that they will be ok if they don’t get paid the rest of this month
– 2 employees have voluntarily taken themselves off payroll until we are stable
– 3 people have agreed to work at least 20 hours a week striclty on equity
– Our office is currently furnished with office furniture that we ‘begged, borrowed and stole’ from other companies
– We have a microwave that we got off Free-Cycle
– We have 2 other requests (for a small fridge and a kitchen style cupboard) out on freecycle
– And, worthy of repeating is that everyone is still coming to work everyday with no guarantee of a paycheck

Things are slowly coming together for us, if we can make it through the next couple weeks I honestly believe that we’ll be just fine. In the meantime, we have an incredibly awesome group of very talented web programmers that build some pretty amazing stuff.

The reason I haven’t blogged lately is 1) I was waiting for Paul to blog about it first and there really isn’t much else for me to consider blogging about 2) I’m our primary sales/marketing person – I’ve been out of the office most of the time concentrating on finding work for us 3) With the new baby at home, I’ve been pretty busy being a new Dad again.

So here’s to breaking the silence and getting on with blogging. I plan to do a lot of blogging about building a new company, bootstrapping and (hopefully) all about our successes!

Oh, and if any of my readers have any leads on website design and marketing, please let me know! I promise we’ll do an awesome job (we have teams that can do PHP and .Net web development).