Breaking the Silence – Redux

Blogging rocks! I’ve been pretty overwhelmed today with the response to my blog last night about Provo Labs – there have been several comments and even more emails about the situation. I want to address several things and clarify several as well. First though, I want to thank my friends and readers for the outpouring of support received today – you know who you are.

The first thing I want to address regards the foreshadowing of the changes at Provo Labs. Several people have asked if I was blindsided or kept in the dark – no such thing. We knew for a while that things were going to be winding down – in fact several people had expected it would happen sooner than it did. Paul and I had had many conversations about where things were heading. In fact, I had pushed Paul to let me start building Provo Labs Consulting as a way to counter the burn rate of having a large development team on staff. Our goal was to have them work on revenue generating projects part of the time and internal projects the rest of the time. That was just getting started when the changes occurred.

To directly reply to Bryan’s question in his comment – no, I wasn’t surprised (honestly, I was a little surprised by the timing and quickness in which it happened though) by the change. Paul wasn’t being arrogant at all, he was very contrite about the whole situation and was very proactive about trying to make sure that we were able to build a company that would make it so there were not several unemployed people coming out of the change. As I stated in my previous post, Paul did talk to me (as his COO) about the entire situation the day before he made the announcement – and I had had some warning that it was likely imminent. It wasn’t as much warning as I would have liked, but it did give me enough time to rapidly put together a strategy so that the next day we were able to begin working on organizing the new company. Finally, I don’t think that Paul was ever secretive or dishonest about the future of the company. Again, those who were working on site everyday had thought the change would happen sooner than it did. I appreciate Bryan’s concern and perhaps my original post didn’t communicate clearly enough the situation leading up to the change.

Russell – no need to tuck your tail your post calling me out to blog was the final catalyst I needed to break the silence on my part.

Eric (dilvie) – you ask a very good question (whether I am stil working on projects like BarCamp and the Geek Dinners) I plan to address this over several upcoming blog posts, but the answer is Yes, I am still planning on very actively working on community building projects. My next post will be an official Geek Dinner post and you should be getting an email tonight, but the next Dinner is next week. BarCamp is still going to happen – Lara, call me – and several other things we were beginning to work on are still going to happen. The thing is, before working on community projects, I had to dedicate all my time to working on building a new company. Things are stabilizing a bit and I am almost to the point that I can start working on them. DevUtah is and always has been my site (not Provo Labs) and I started the Geek Dinner project before I started working at Provo Labs. We are still wanting to get Entrepreneur Conversations and WordMob going. As time allows, I plan to do a lot of work on community projects, they are extremely important to me.

Jeff Barson – Actually, we don’t have a website yet. We don’t even have a name yet We are formally operating under an S Corp called NetBrick that has been around since 2002. We will be filing a DBA soon and an official corp name change shortly thereafter. Coming up with a name has proven to be a drawn out process and to be honest, one that hasn’t had a lot of priority as we work on building our company. We fully recognize the importance of having an outstanding website and have opted for none in place of a hastily thrown together one that we don’t have time to build right now. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to have a name, url and website started sometime next week. As for what we do, I plan to do at least one blog post describing the full abilities of our team but for now, we have a graphic artist (one of the best I’ve ever met), a CSS ninja, several LAMP Jedi Knights, two SEO gurus and some amazing .Net wizards. All of which essentially makes us a full service .Net and LAMP web design and marketing shop.