General Discussion

my startup did, but not from Sand Hill road VCs. This was in 2001. Dot Com bust.

I tell a story that you could have put a magic machine on the table in front of the VC guys that you put a stack of 100 dollar bills in one side, and flip a switch and you get out bundles of legit legal 100 dollar bills out the other side and all you ask is $10 million to fund it and they would have turned you down.

I literally walked into one meeting after the partners had just "scrubbed" a 100 million dollar fund ( every venture they gave money to was bankrupt now ). You have never seen so many frowning faces. I was proposing a new application for the internet for small to medium businesses... automatic constant incremental backup over the internet. My patents were in the field of what is now called de-duplication ( a term I hate for what I invented ). The internet was still "slow" 25 years ago, so doing any backups over the internet was difficult without my technology. However, 9/11 made everyone aware that backups off prem were absolutely required... and tape backups done nightly were no longer "good enough". Business continuity was essential. I had a way to do constant incremental backups and "de-dupe" the change data before sending it to my backup as a service ( BAAS ) at colo places around the country. Again, this was 20 to 25 years ago now. Standard practice today.

I spent a year as an EIR for Siemens looking at other business plans... and they eventually hooked me up with some crazy Australian investors.

I inked a deal with another startup called "Cobalt" who make Linux servers with a point and click admin interface... everyone was buying these 1U servers and sticking them into public server farms ( colos ) and putting their web based companies on them... Cobalt was going to include my BAAS software as a standard option and do the sales for me. Web company buys a cobalt, rents space and bandwidth... signs up for a monthly fee for my BAAS... no problem. But then Cobalt was purchased by Sun Microsystems ( a major supplier of workstations and web servers in the day ) and Sun decided to cancel the contract. Sigh.



Long story short, the Aussies never came up with the money to go into production... we noodled along and eventually sold the company to a larger tech backup company for some decent money... but not the 100s of millions that I think it might have been worth.

oh well. My investors and I made some money.