Allaire/Macromedia

Forgoing an Economics PhD scholarship at Stanford in order to join Allaire’s founding team was one of the better decisions I’ve made.

JJ Allaire invented the de facto standard Web 1.0 programming model–mixing snippets of code with HTML to generate dynamic Web pages. I became the architect of Allaire’s flagship product, the first Web application server ColdFusion. Many thousands of sites run on it–just look for the .cfm extensions. Allaire was bootstrapped on $18k. We raised money from Polaris Venture Partners in 1996, went public in 1999, acquired several companies and merged with Macromedia (now Adobe) in 2001.

We built a real business in the middle of Bubble 1.0 with revenues over $100M and positive EBITDA, which was out-of-fashion those days. We also created probably the strongest (at the time) Web developer community, something which many on the founding team are still proud of. We made tons of mistakes also, some of which capped the value of the company under $3B. I learned much about culture, building teams, hypergrowth and layoffs, positioning and shipping products, competing in empty vs. crowded waters, cannibalization and building communities and the costs and benefits of standardizaton and open-sourcing technologies. I have many scars.