JotBlog

There’s a meme floating around that we’re seeing a return to the madness of 1999: ridiculous valuations, massive investments, hypergrowth, etc. I don’t know if that’s true or not – there may be a bit of evidence in that direction, but I think it’s too early to tell. Regardless, my own experiences with bubble excesses have made me very keen to avoid repeating history. In fact, Joe and I often worry that we’re “fighting the last war” by trying to make the company too lean.

So I was surprised and disappointed by the tone of Matt Marshall’s latest article on the “wiki war.” He’s trying to paint a David and Goliath story with one scrappy company that stayed “hunkered down” with “only” 10 people, working from home; then comes the hulking behemoth of JotSpot (surely hiring like it’s 1999 – oh wait, we have 10 employees too), throwing around millions of dollars from “big-name venture capital firms” and “boasting” about our features.

The article was prompted by news that a big company dropped SocialText to use JotSpot instead. So I should first say that yes, we are thrilled and I think justifiably proud that Disney prefers our product to SocialText’s. We’re also embarrassed about the leak of the news. (I’m told that we can blame our PR group for misunderstanding us on that one, but I don’t want to scold them about it because otherwise they’ve done a fantastic job.)

To correct some inaccuracies from the article:

• We are not in Palo Alto “all the better to lure away employees” from SocialText. We’re in Palo Alto because most of our employees live here (or in nearby cities). We like being able to bike to work. (A little fact-checking would have made it even more obvious that we’re not in Palo Alto to “lure” SocialText employees: many of SocialText’s employee’s don’t even live in the Bay Area.)
• Despite the implication of lavishly-funded office space, we only moved out of our houses when a venture capital company was kind enough to let us squat in their incubator space for free. We eventually outgrew that space, so we’ve been in our new offices for a few months. (Sadly the new place is more expensive than free and a lot less luxurious than a VC office.) In any event, I personally think there’s value to having all of our employees in one place, especially when our rent averages out to a few lattes per employee per day.
• “A dozen more specialists:” We have paid a handful of open-source committers to add features to their projects, and we give those features back to the community. (While we’re on the topic, I should mention that two of our full-time employees spend significant fractions of their JotSpot time managing open-source projects.)
• Most importantly, Ross agrees with us that Disney did not pick JotSpot because we had more venture money – they picked us because we had features they wanted.

Yes, we raised venture capital money; but the relevant question about venture money is not how much we raised but how long it will last us. Having the money in the bank doesn’t mean we’re spending it like drunken sailors. (At least I hope Joe isn’t – but where did that mahogany desk come from?)

Clearly JotSpot and SocialText are rivals, but we have very different strategies: JotSpot is adding structure to wikis to enable rapid development of simple applications, while SocialText is trying to build the “easiest to use, simplest and quickest wiki.'’ Customers will decide for themselves which approach they like better, and I have no doubt both companies will be successful – wikis are a big enough idea to support more than one player.

This isn’t about a rich, mean company stomping all over a little guy. Somebody else has already said it: “It’s normal everyday business and social software companies are no less in this to win (and sometimes lose) customers.”

Here�s the bottom line � we�re competitive, we�re proud of our service and the team of people we�ve built and we�re excited about a budding customer list. However, we�re building a frugal, responsible culture, not one in which �boastful� people spend wildly while �luring� away the employees of a competitor pursuing a different strategy. That�s just not us.

PS: to answer the question in the preceding link of why we didn’t blog the news straight away – we didn’t mention it because Disney had asked us not to make a big deal about it. Hence our embarrassment at the leak.